[ILUG] sed

[Baruch Even]

* olearypj at rte.ie <olearypj at rte.ie> [040711 14:14]:
> Hi Timothy, 
>              Thanks for the reply, this is a bit of the output form "od -c email"
> where I thought the blank lines were, or at least thats what it looks when I
> look at the email as a text file.
> 
> 0003560   :       r   o   o   t   @   a   u   s   -   c   i   t   y   .
> 0003600   c   o   m  \r  \n  \r  \n  \r  \n   O   S   C   A   R       7
> 0003620  \r  \n   1       0   7   5   3   0   U       7   4   0   8   9
> 
> The \r \n characters between city.com & oscar 7 is where I thought the blank
> lines  were

For some reason your mail has dos end of lines (\r\n) instead of unix
eol (\r).

sed is confused for that, try a file with the content:
---
aaa

bbb
---

Once load it in vim, set ff=unix, write it and run your sed script,
and again set ff=dos, write and test with sed. The ff=dos case fails.

The problem is that the line is not empty as far as sed is concerned, it
has a \n character in it.

You can try the command: sed -e '1,/^[[:space:]]\?$/d'
to try to handle lines with a single space in them (\n is a space).

I couldn't find how to specify \n by itself.

Baruch