Different ways to print non-empty lines in a file

 There are times when we want to display only the actual lines in a file, leaving the blank lines. There are various methods in which we can print only the non-empty lines of a file.

1. The simplest of all is using the famous 'grep' command:

grep -v '^$' file

     This is one of the most common methods used to get the non-empty lines of a file. The '^' is used to denote "lines beginning with", and '$' is used to denote "lines ending with".  In this case, '^$' means a line beginning with and ending, which is nothing but a blank line. By using the -v options, we get the lines other than the blank lines.

2. Different ways of achieving the same thing in sed:

sed '/^$/D' file

      The above method removes('D') all the patterns(blank lines) matching and displays the rest.

sed -n '/^$/!p' file

     This form suppresses the default output(-n) and prints the non-empty(!p) lines.

3. Three different ways of getting non-empty lines using awk;

awk NF file

     This is my favourite of all. NF indicates the total number of fields, and hence this prints only non-blank lines, since in blank lines NF is 0 and evaluates to false.

awk 'length' file

      This one is almost same as the above, but uses the length function and prints only those lines whose length is > 0.

awk '$0 !~ /^$/' file

      An other option using awk as the previous methods.  !~ indicates lines not containing.

4. Getting the non-empty lines using perl:

perl -lne 'print if length($_) ' file

      This is perl version of using the same in awk as before.

perl -lne 'print if $_ ne ""' file

     $_ indicates the current line. Prints only those lines which is not(ne) blank.

perl -ne 'print unless /^$/' file

     'print unless' indicates print lines which does not contain.

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