Question

I have this script which is printing out the files that have the first line blank:

for f in `find . -regex ".*\.php"`; do 
  for t in head; do 
    $t -1 $f  |egrep '^[  ]*$' >/dev/null && echo "blank line at the $t of $f"; 
  done; 
done

How can I improve this to actually remove the blank line too, or at least copy all the files with the blank first line somewhere else.

I tried copying using this, which is good, because it copies preserving the directory structure, but it was copying every php file, and I needed to capture the postive output of the egrep and only copy those files.

rsync -R $f ../DavidSiteBlankFirst/

Answer 1

I would use sed personally

find ./ -type f -regex '.*\.php' -exec sed -i -e '1{/^[[:blank:]]*$/d;}' '{}' \;

this finds all the regular files ending in .php and executes the sed command which works on the first line only and checks to see if its blank and deletes it if it is, other blank lines in the file remain unaffected.