cat or more

[A.G.M. Velthof]

Hello to all,

can anyone help me with the command to list the content of a file without lines starting with a "#"

Thanks, Alfons

P.S. This thread has been moved from HP-UX>System Administration to  HP-UX > languages. -HP Forum Moderator

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

If you just want to omit lines with the '#' sign in the first column then this will do:

grep -v ^# /some/file

You can also pipe the output to 'more' as well.

grep -v ^# /some/file | more

If you want to list a file without ANY comment lines or blank lines, then try the following:

awk 'NF && ! /^[[:space:]]*#/' /some/file

You can also set the above as an alias so it is easier to use.  For example:

alias noc="awk 'NF && ! /^[[:space:]]*#/'"

Once the alias is set, you can just do:

noc /some/file

(By the way 'noc' means 'no comment')

[A.G.M. Velthof]

Thanks Patrick,

just what I needed.

Groeten, Alfons

[pooderbill]

And to add to Patrick's solution, the noc alias is a true filter and can be used to read a file or accept stdin, like this:

noc /some/file

swlist -l patch | noc