Here’s a quick way to remove blank lines from a file using PowerShell. This will also remove lines that only have spaces.
(gc file.txt) | ? {$_.trim() -ne "" } | set-content file.txt
gc
is an abbreviation for get-content- The parenthesis causes the
get-content
(gc
) command to finish before proceeding through the pipeline. Without the parenthesis, the file would be locked and we couldn’t write back to it. ?
is an abbreviation for “where-object”. Essentially, an “if” statement-ne
is an operator that means “not equal to”trim()
is a method removes lines that contain spaces but nothing else which is what I needed in my case.
Thanks to Leon @ http://secretgeek.net/gc_blank.asp for inspiration! PowerShell is pretty handy!