Removing trailing / starting newlines with sed, awk, tr, and friends - unix

Question

I would like to remove all of the empty lines from a file, but only when they are at the end/start of a file (that is, if there are no non-empty lines before them, at the start; and if there are no non-empty lines after them, at the end.)
Is this possible outside of a fully-featured scripting language like Perl or Ruby? I’d prefer to do this with sed or awk if possible. Basically, any light-weight and widely available UNIX-y tool would be fine, especially one I can learn more about quickly (Perl, thus, not included.)

Answer 1

From Useful one-line scripts for sed:
# Delete all leading blank lines at top of file (only).
sed '/./,$!d' file
# Delete all trailing blank lines at end of file (only).
sed -e :a -e '/^\n*$/{$d;N;};/\n$/ba' file
Therefore, to remove both leading and trailing blank lines from a file, you can combine the above commands into:
sed -e :a -e '/./,$!d;/^\n*$/{$d;N;};/\n$/ba' file

Answer 2

So I'm going to borrow part of #dogbane's answer for this, since that sed line for removing the leading blank lines is so short...
tac is part of coreutils, and reverses a file. So do it twice:
tac file | sed -e '/./,$!d' | tac | sed -e '/./,$!d'
It's certainly not the most efficient, but unless you need efficiency, I find it more readable than everything else so far.

Answer 3

here's a one-pass solution in awk: it does not start printing until it sees a non-empty line and when it sees an empty line, it remembers it until the next non-empty line
awk '
/[[:graph:]]/ {
# a non-empty line
# set the flag to begin printing lines
p=1
# print the accumulated "interior" empty lines
for (i=1; i<=n; i++) print ""
n=0
# then print this line
print
}
p && /^[[:space:]]*$/ {
# a potentially "interior" empty line. remember it.
n++
}
' filename
Note, due to the mechanism I'm using to consider empty/non-empty lines (with [[:graph:]] and /^[[:space:]]*$/), interior lines with only whitespace will be truncated to become truly empty.

Answer 4

As mentioned in another answer, tac is part of coreutils, and reverses a file. Combining the idea of doing it twice with the fact that command substitution will strip trailing new lines, we get
echo "$(echo "$(tac "$filename")" | tac)"
which doesn't depend on sed. You can use echo -n to strip the remaining trailing newline off.

Answer 5

Here's an adapted sed version, which also considers "empty" those lines with just spaces and tabs on it.
sed -e :a -e '/[^[:blank:]]/,$!d; /^[[:space:]]*$/{ $d; N; ba' -e '}'
It's basically the accepted answer version (considering BryanH comment), but the dot . in the first command was changed to [^[:blank:]] (anything not blank) and the \n inside the second command address was changed to [[:space:]] to allow newlines, spaces an tabs.
An alternative version, without using the POSIX classes, but your sed must support inserting \t and \n inside […]. GNU sed does, BSD sed doesn't.
sed -e :a -e '/[^\t ]/,$!d; /^[\n\t ]*$/{ $d; N; ba' -e '}'
Testing:
prompt$ printf '\n \t \n\nfoo\n\nfoo\n\n \t \n\n'
foo
foo
prompt$ printf '\n \t \n\nfoo\n\nfoo\n\n \t \n\n' | sed -n l
$
\t $
$
foo$
$
foo$
$
\t $
$
prompt$ printf '\n \t \n\nfoo\n\nfoo\n\n \t \n\n' | sed -e :a -e '/[^[:blank:]]/,$!d; /^[[:space:]]*$/{ $d; N; ba' -e '}'
foo
foo
prompt$

Answer 6

using awk:
awk '{a[NR]=$0;if($0 && !s)s=NR;}
END{e=NR;
for(i=NR;i>1;i--)
if(a[i]){ e=i; break; }
for(i=s;i<=e;i++)
print a[i];}' yourFile

Answer 7

this can be solved easily with sed -z option
sed -rz 's/^\n+//; s/\n+$/\n/g' file
Hello
Welcome to
Unix and Linux

Answer 8

For an efficient non-recursive version of the trailing newlines strip (including "white" characters) I've developed this sed script.
sed -n '/^[[:space:]]*$/ !{x;/\n/{s/^\n//;p;s/.*//;};x;p;}; /^[[:space:]]*$/H'
It uses the hold buffer to store all blank lines and prints them only after it finds a non-blank line. Should someone want only the newlines, it's enough to get rid of the two [[:space:]]* parts:
sed -n '/^$/ !{x;/\n/{s/^\n//;p;s/.*//;};x;p;}; /^$/H'
I've tried a simple performance comparison with the well-known recursive script
sed -e :a -e '/^\n*$/{$d;N;};/\n$/ba'
on a 3MB file with 1MB of random blank lines around a random base64 text.
shuf -re 1 2 3 | tr -d "\n" | tr 123 " \t\n" | dd bs=1 count=1M > bigfile
base64 </dev/urandom | dd bs=1 count=1M >> bigfile
shuf -re 1 2 3 | tr -d "\n" | tr 123 " \t\n" | dd bs=1 count=1M >> bigfile
The streaming script took roughly 0.5 second to complete, the recursive didn't end after 15 minutes. Win :)
For completeness sake of the answer, the leading lines stripping sed script is already streaming fine. Use the most suitable for you.
sed '/[^[:blank:]]/,$!d'
sed '/./,$!d'

Answer 9

Using bash
$ filecontent=$(<file)
$ echo "${filecontent/$'\n'}"

Answer 10

In bash, using cat, wc, grep, sed, tail and head:
# number of first line that contains non-empty character
i=`grep -n "^[^\B*]" <your_file> | sed -e 's/:.*//' | head -1`
# number of hte last one
j=`grep -n "^[^\B*]" <your_file> | sed -e 's/:.*//' | tail -1`
# overall number of lines:
k=`cat <your_file> | wc -l`
# how much empty lines at the end of file we have?
m=$(($k-$j))
# let strip last m lines!
cat <your_file> | head -n-$m
# now we have to strip first i lines and we are done 8-)
cat <your_file> | tail -n+$i
Man, it's definitely worth to learn "real" programming language to avoid that ugliness!

Answer 11

#dogbane has a nice simple answer for removing leading empty lines. Here's a simple awk command which removes just the trailing lines. Use this with #dogbane's sed command to remove both leading and trailing blanks.
awk '{ LINES=LINES $0 "\n"; } /./ { printf "%s", LINES; LINES=""; }'
This is pretty simple in operation.
Add every line to a buffer as we read it.
For every line which contains a character, print the contents of the buffer and then clear it.
So the only things that get buffered and never displayed are any trailing blanks.
I used printf instead of print to avoid the automatic addition of a newline, since I'm using newlines to separate the lines in the buffer already.

Answer 12

This AWK script will do the trick:
BEGIN {
ne=0;
}
/^[[:space:]]*$/ {
ne++;
}
/[^[:space:]]+/ {
for(i=0; i < ne; i++)
print "";
ne=0;
print
}
The idea is simple: empty lines do not get echoed immediately. Instead, we wait till we get a non-empty line, and only then we first echo out as much empty lines as seen before it, and only then echo out the new non-empty line.

Answer 13

perl -0pe 's/^\n+|\n+(\n)$/\1/gs'

Answer 14

Here's an awk version that removes trailing blank lines (both empty lines and lines consisting of nothing but white space).
It is memory efficient; it does not read the entire file into memory.
awk '/^[[:space:]]*$/ {b=b $0 "\n"; next;} {printf "%s",b; b=""; print;}'
The b variable buffers up the blank lines; they get printed when a non-blank line is encountered. When EOF is encountered, they don't get printed. That's how it works.
If using gnu awk, [[:space:]] can be replaced with \s. (See full list of gawk-specific Regexp Operators.)
If you want to remove only those trailing lines that are empty, see #AndyMortimer's answer.

Answer 15

A bash solution.
Note: Only useful if the file is small enough to be read into memory at once.
[[ $(<file) =~ ^$'\n'*(.*)$ ]] && echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
$(<file) reads the entire file and trims trailing newlines, because command substitution ($(....)) implicitly does that.
=~ is bash's regular-expression matching operator, and =~ ^$'\n'*(.*)$ optionally matches any leading newlines (greedily), and captures whatever comes after. Note the potentially confusing $'\n', which inserts a literal newline using ANSI C quoting, because escape sequence \n is not supported.
Note that this particular regex always matches, so the command after && is always executed.
Special array variable BASH_REMATCH rematch contains the results of the most recent regex match, and array element [1] contains what the (first and only) parenthesized subexpression (capture group) captured, which is the input string with any leading newlines stripped. The net effect is that ${BASH_REMATCH[1]} contains the input file content with both leading and trailing newlines stripped.
Note that printing with echo adds a single trailing newline. If you want to avoid that, use echo -n instead (or use the more portable printf '%s').

Answer 16

I'd like to introduce another variant for gawk v4.1+
result=($(gawk '
BEGIN {
lines_count = 0;
empty_lines_in_head = 0;
empty_lines_in_tail = 0;
}
/[^[:space:]]/ {
found_not_empty_line = 1;
empty_lines_in_tail = 0;
}
/^[[:space:]]*?$/ {
if ( found_not_empty_line ) {
empty_lines_in_tail ++;
} else {
empty_lines_in_head ++;
}
}
{
lines_count ++;
}
END {
print (empty_lines_in_head " " empty_lines_in_tail " " lines_count);
}
' "$file"))
empty_lines_in_head=${result[0]}
empty_lines_in_tail=${result[1]}
lines_count=${result[2]}
if [ $empty_lines_in_head -gt 0 ] || [ $empty_lines_in_tail -gt 0 ]; then
echo "Removing whitespace from \"$file\""
eval "gawk -i inplace '
{
if ( NR > $empty_lines_in_head && NR <= $(($lines_count - $empty_lines_in_tail)) ) {
print
}
}
' \"$file\""
fi

Answer 17

Because I was writing a bash script anyway containing some functions, I found it convenient to write those:
function strip_leading_empty_lines()
{
while read line; do
if [ -n "$line" ]; then
echo "$line"
break
fi
done
cat
}
function strip_trailing_empty_lines()
{
acc=""
while read line; do
acc+="$line"$'\n'
if [ -n "$line" ]; then
echo -n "$acc"
acc=""
fi
done
}