Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!gatech!nascom!rar
From: rar@nascom.UUCP (Alan Ramacher)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: sed script to combine blank lines?
Summary: use awk not sed
Keywords: sed
Message-ID: <136@nascom.UUCP>
Date: 13 Oct 88 15:36:16 GMT
References: <192@vlsi.ll.mit.edu>
Distribution: comp
Organization: National Advanced Systems,  Atlanta, Ga.
Lines: 14

In article <192@vlsi.ll.mit.edu>, young@vlsi.ll.mit.edu (George Young) writes:
> Is there a 'sed' wizard out there?  I often want to take a big ascii file
> (like a .c file after cc -E) and collapse each group of 'blank' lines
> into exactly one blank line.  'Blank' here is any combination of blanks,
> tabs and maybe ^L's.  It looks from the documentation that sed should do this
> quite neatly, using the multiple line pattern space commands with imbedded
> newlines, but I sure can't figure out how.  I'd prefer the resulting blank
> line to be just a newline.

sed is not powerful enuf for the job, but a simple awk script will
work. If you have difficulties writting it, let me know and I will
supply one. Good luck.

	Allan Ramacher