Question

I’m running the following but it’s returning with empty lines at the top and bottom of the new file.

How do I output to a new file without these empty lines?

input | sed -E '/^$/d' > file.txt

The following has no effect either.

sed '1d'  
sed '$d'

I’m unsure of where the expression has problems.

Answer 1

If you are comfortable using awk then this would work –

awk 'NF' INPUT_FILE > OUTPUT_FILE