in reply to Removing double carriage return

Use the file slurp argument switch, '0'

perl -i.bak -0pe 's/\n\n/\n/g' inputtext

Update: I chose zero instead of octal 0777 thinking it would be clearer but GrandFather may have a good point, (a byte having possible values of 0 to 255 and the base 10 value of 0777 is 511). I guess I was thinking also that double zero, 00, is the switch for paragraph mode reading.

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Re^2: Removing double carriage return
by GrandFather (Saint) on Aug 20, 2011 at 02:54 UTC

    actually:

    perl -i.bak -0777pe 's/\n\n/\n/g' inputtext

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    may be sightly better as no byte value matches octal 777, although that's rather nit picking and I'd have not noticed if I hadn't have needed to look up perlrun to find out what -0 (the digit 0 btw) actually does. ;)

    True laziness is hard work
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