As part of the hosting migration, I had some text files that had an extra empty line in them. This was caused by a newline followed by another newline.
On my pc I can search and replace for these using a good text editor. But it’s a bit harder to do on a linux command line.
The fix if it is just an empty new line is to use sed
sed '/^$/d'
as in
sed '/^$/d' < textfile.txt > newtextfile.txt
If the new lines have whitespace (a space or a tab) then use
sed '/^[ \t]*$/d'
You can also get information about the file with the file command
file textfile.txt textfile.txt: ASCII English text
Beware if the output is
textfile.txt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF, LF line terminators
as you’ll need to use
dos2unix textfile.txt
to convert it to a unix text file.
For people searching for the cause, most of these double new lines occured because a PHP script included another PHP script with require_once. The included PHP file had a whitespace at the end of the file after the
?>
close.
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