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From: maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: sed script to combine blank lines?
Keywords: sed
Message-ID: <1520@piraat.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 13 Oct 88 22:16:51 GMT
References: <192@vlsi.ll.mit.edu>
Reply-To: maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath)
Distribution: comp
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 18

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.

How about `awk'?

% cat /usr/local/bin/deblank
#! /bin/sh
exec awk '$0 !~ /^[ \t\f]*$/ { print; prev = 0; next }
		{ if (prev) next }
		{ prev = 1; print "" }
'
%
-- 
Hippic sport:                         |Maarten Litmaath @ Free U Amsterdam:
             a contradiction in terms.|maart@cs.vu.nl, mcvax!botter!maart