November 5, 2013
HOWTO Trim comments and spaces from files
Learn a quick and efficient way to remove comments and blank lines from config files using a simple grep command and regex—perfect for cleaner outputs and easier parsing.
Trim comments and spaces from a file:
$ grep ^[^#] file
“The regex ^[^#] matches the first character of any line, as long as that character that is not a #. Because blank lines don’t have a first character they’re not matched either, resulting in a nice compact output of just the active configuration lines.”
Via David Berner