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

[Gary Kline]

On Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 04:23:01PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 08:11:48PM +0100, Mark Willson wrote:
> > 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?!
> > >
> > >tia,
> > >
> > >gary
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > Gary,
> > 
> > If I understand your question correctly (by no means certain), the
> > following may help.  This is an awk script, which will print out the
> > lines in the source file at which it finds more than three consecutive
> > empty lines.
> > 
> > BEGIN {
> >     ncnt = 0
> > }
> > /^ *$/ {
> > 	ncnt++;
> >         if (ncnt > 3)
> > 		{print "Emphasis at: " NR;
> > 		 ncnt = 0;}
> > 	 next;
> > 	}
> >        {ncnt = 0;}
> > 
> > You can invoke this (assuming the awk source in is a file called
> > "em.awk" and your original manuscript is in a file called "manuscript") by:
> > 
> > $ awk -f em.awk manuscript
> > 
> > -mark
> 
> 
> 	Yes, this works just fine.  I findthat there are about 130 places that I need to
> 	track...  --yeah, i did over-do it in the time-breaks in my story.  
> 
> 	Is there a way of printing the string/line in the `manuscript' file along with the line
> 	number?  I'm well into a copyedit of the manuscript and would rather not start over!
> 
> 	thanks for this.
> 
:wq

	Sorry:: sounds a bit moronic:: not print the blank line/newline!  but print the
	NR-1-th line.
> 
-- 
 Gary Kline  kline at thought.org  http://www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
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