Removing Comments and Blank lines of a config file

Remove blank lines and comments from a config file

Using 'grep' and 'sed' we can strip out comments and blank lines of any file. you can then redirect the output to a file if you so wish. In this example I will use it to remove the comments and blank lines from my apache2.conf file

grep -v "#" /etc/apache2/apache2.conf | sed -e '/^$/d'

If you wish to leave the blank lines then simply omit the sed statement.

Alternatively you can use egrep

egrep -v '(#|^\s*$)'

With both options you can of course redirect output to a new file. The default is stdout