Re: Skipping comments in load files

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Joe Koski wrote:

> I figured out my problem. The particular file that I picked to try as an 
> example had a single space on the last "blank" line of the file.


I don't know how people usually deal with this kind of thing, but 
something like this will alter the original file 'filename' without making 
a copy, and it will remove all spaces and tabs from all otherwise empty 
lines:

perl -pi -e 's/^[ \t]+$//' filename

Is that enough to correct the problem with all files?  Is it ok to have 
consecutive newlines (\n)?  A nice thing about it is that 'filename' can 
include wildcard characters so that you can do things like this...

perl -pi -e 's/^[ \t]+$//' *.txt

...to fix every file in a directory.

You can also make a script called "despacer" (or whatever you want to call 
it) that looks like this...

---begin script on next line-----
#!/usr/bin/perl -i -p
s/^[ \t]+$//
---end script on previous line-----

...and works like this:

despacer *.txt

Note that /usr/bin/perl must be replaced with the path to perl on your 
system and you must run "chmod a+x despacer" to make the file executable. 
Also remember that the command will alter your files without backing them 
up.  It is possible to write the script to automatically back them up, but 
it is usually undesirable in this situation, I would think.

Just thought I'd toss that out there because it took me a while to 
discover how useful perl could be for that kind of thing and there must be 
someone else in this world who could profit from it.

Best,

Mike



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