How can I remove empty lines in every file of a directory?

Question

How can I remove empty /blank lines in every txt file of a directory (ideally subdirectories too)?

find . -name '*.txt' -exec ex '+%s/\ / /g' -cwq {} \;

Above code is pulling list of files correctly but i am not sure what regular expression to pass to remove blank lines.

You might want to use `sed`, see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16414410/delete-empty-lines-using-sed — jmcastagnetto, Oct 25 '19 at 17:20
Thanks for the link. How can i used sed for subdirectories as well? sed -r '/^\s*$/d' — Ammad, Oct 25 '19 at 17:25

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 25 '19 at 17:31

2

With GNU find and GNU sed:

find . -name '*.txt' -exec sed -ri '/^\s*$/d' {} \;

answered Oct 25 '19 at 17:31

Cyrus

1

afaik inplace editing works with multiple files as well, so you can use bulk exec here – oguz ismail Oct 25 '19 at 17:35
The `-r` option is a GNU extension. This could comfortably be refactored to standard POSIX `sed`; but then the `-i` option is also not strictly standard (though widely available). Maybe for maximum portability try `find ... -exec perl -ni -e 'print unless /^\s*$/' {} \;` even though paradoxically Perl is not officially standardized at all. (Maybe also see if your `find` supports `-exec ... {} +`.) – tripleee Oct 25 '19 at 17:39

1 Answers1