On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 09:37:02AM +1000, Alex Samad <alex@samad.com.au> was heard to say: > this started out as a grep quetion > > trying to look at a file with out the comments in it > > i tried grep -v '^\s*;' ; is the comment delimiter. > > but this left me with lots of blank lines. Have you tried this? egrep -v '\s*(;|$)' Seems a lot easier than writing hairy Perl code (but I repeat myself). Daniel