awk help

[AlStl]

I am new to awk or nawk and inherited a script (add1.awk) , which is as follows:

#!/bin/nawk -f
{
gsub(/\015/, "")
gsub(/^ *$/, "")
}

I am issuing this command at the prompt:
add1.awk file.txt

file.txt is as follows (as you can clearly see it has bunch of blank lines in it):

Jane Doe
123 Main Street
Anywhere, SE 12345-7890

John Smith
456 amit-lined Avenue
Smallville, MW 11111-0000

Can someone explain to me what these two gsub are for i.e.

gsub(/\015/, "")
gsub(/^ *$/, "")

It seems that they are not doing anything even when I redirect it to output.txt file:

add1.awk file.txt > output.txt

output.txt is same as file.txt so these two function are not doing anything to input file. I was hoping atleast one of the function is to remove blank lines.

Thanks,

Al

 

[PHV]

remove blank lines
awk '!/^ *$/' file.txt

Hope This Helps, PH.
FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886