Question

I want remove comment lines, beginning with “#”, from the middle of a file, without removing header comment lines at the top of the file. How can I do this using shell scripts and standard Unix tools?

#DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE.
#Mon Jan 14 22:25:16 PST 2013
/test/v1=1.0
#PROPERTIES P1.   <------REMOVE THIS 
/test/p1=1.0
/test/p2=1.0
/test/p3=3.0
/test/p41=4.0
/test/v6=1.0
#. P2 PROPERTIES   <------REMOVE THIS
/test/p1=1.0
/test/p2=1.0
/test/p3=3.0
/test/p41=4.0
/test/v6=1.0
.................
.................

Output

#DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE.
#Mon Jan 14 22:25:16 PST 2013
/test/v1=1.0
/test/p1=1.0
/test/p2=1.0
/test/p3=3.0
/test/p41=4.0
/test/v6=1.0
/test/p1=1.0
/test/p2=1.0
/test/p3=3.0
/test/p41=4.0
/test/v6=1.0
.................
.................

Answer 1

You can try awk:

awk 'NR==1 || NR==2 || !/^#/' file.txt