tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) (02/07/90)
In article <1990Feb6.153718.4546@eplrx7.uucp> mcneill@eplrx7.uucp (Keith McNeill) writes: >Subject says most of it... > >I have something now called trim-headers ((C) 1986 Dave Taylor) but it gets >a little carried away now & then....it trims off the entire message. Well, if you accept that a "mail message" consists of a header and a body delimited by a blank line, a sed one-liner should do it: sed -n -e '/^$/,$p' files ... Although ctually that gives you the blank line. this one eats it sed -e '1,/^$/d' files ... If you want to actually modify the file in-place, then you might do something like this: foreach file ( files ... ) sed -e '1,/^$/d' < $file > $file.tmp && mv $file.tmp $file end or as a one-liner in perl (you knew this was coming, right? :-) perl -i -n -e 'print unless 1../^$/;' files ... or for the faint of heart desiring backup files: perl -i.bak -n -e 'print unless 1../^$/;' files ... and for the record, the keep-the-blank-line version is perl -i -n -e 'print if /^$/..eof();' files ... --tom -- Tom Christiansen {uunet,uiucdcs,sun}!convex!tchrist Convex Computer Corporation tchrist@convex.COM "EMACS belongs in <sys/errno.h>: Editor too big!"