How to remove blank lines from a Unix file

by 
sed -i '/^$/d' foo

This tells sed to delete every line matching the regex ^$ i.e. every empty line. The -i flag edits the file in-place, if your sed doesn’t support that you can write the output to a temporary file and replace the original:

sed '/^$/d' foo > foo.tmp
mv foo.tmp foo

If you also want to remove lines consisting only of whitespace (not just empty lines) then use:

sed -i '/^[[:space:]]*$/d' foo

Edit: also remove whitespace at the end of lines, because apparently you’ve decided you need that too:

sed -i '/^[[:space:]]*$/d;s/[[:space:]]*$//' foo

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