Remove trailing blank lines from multiple files

Question

What is the easiest way to remove blank lines from multiple files at once?

I'm working on Solaris 10.

Answer 1

A quick little script should work. I got this from nixCraft a while a go and it works quite well.

#!/bin/sh
files="/home/me/data/*.txt"
for i in $files
do
  sed '/^$/d' $i > $i.out
  mv  $i.out $i
done

Replace $files for your needs.

Answer 2

It'll be easiest to remove all blank lines:

sed -i.bak '/^$/d' $FILES

This will create a backup with the extension .bak, take that out if you don't want a backup.

If you want to remove lines with whitespace (and only whitespace) too, add \W*:

sed -i.bak '/^\W*$/d' $FILES

And this works with the --posix option in gnu sed (turns off gnu extensions, so I think this should work on solaris):

sed -i.bak '/^[ \t]*$/d' $FILES

Add more whitespace characters if necessary.