Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2017 13:54:41 -0500 From: "James B. Byrne" <byrnejb@harte-lyne.ca> To: "Polytropon" <freebsd@edvax.de> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: sed - remove nul lines from file Message-ID: <76aef2fd3792a0d9291b90cb74b6924f.squirrel@webmail.harte-lyne.ca> In-Reply-To: <20171107193652.7b0aa08f.freebsd@edvax.de> References: <b21bf201363c34a90ab55c4a05ff8fd7.squirrel@webmail.harte-lyne.ca> <20171107193652.7b0aa08f.freebsd@edvax.de>
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On Tue, November 7, 2017 13:36, Polytropon wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Nov 2017 12:12:55 -0500, James B. Byrne via
> freebsd-questions wrote:
>> I have a data file created by an ancient proprietary scripting
>> language called QTP. There is a bug in this program which, on
>> occasion, manifests itself by inserting output records consisting
>> entirely of nul (^@) (\x00) bytes at regular intervals. In the
>> present case every 47th. record consists entirely of nuls.
>
...
> In this case, awk can also help:
>
> $ awk '(length > 0)' < infile.txt > outfile.txt
>
> This will print all lines which are longer than 0 characters.
>
Thank you very much. This worked exactly as I required.
I infer from this that awk does not consider nul a character and its
presence does not count towards the length of a record. Which is
counter intuitive to me. A nul takes up the same space as any other
character so why is it not counted? I would not have tried this
construction for that reason.
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