is there a way of usinf greo to find 3 or 4 blank lines?

[Gary Kline]

On Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 03:44:13PM -0500, Mak Kolybabi wrote:
> On 2009-09-05 17:36, Gary Kline wrote:
> > in my manuscript, i have many places where i'ved used several newlines to
> > indicate a jump in time, or topic, or mood, or <<whatever>>. i have lost these
> > vertical spacing in all but my original draft. can i use grep somehow to find
> > these extra newlines?
> >
> > if not grep, then sed, ed, or what?!
> 
> Sed has the ability to pull into the current line the next line, appended and
> separated by a "\n" character. It's hard to use correctly, I've found, and my
> simple demo:
> 
> sed -e '/^$/{N;N;N; s/^\n\n\n$/===4 blank lines==/; }'
> 
> Does not quite work as I'd hoped. But hopefully it's enough to get you started.
> 


	Thanks, Mak.  iT really *is* more difficult that grep can handle.  I could catch the 
	three newlines in C, but the string/line above the break would be painful unless i
	kept a linked list of linenumbers.  too much like work:-)

	gary


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> Matthew Anthony Kolybabi (Mak)
> <mak at kolybabi.com>
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 Gary Kline  kline at thought.org  http://www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
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