How can I replace multiple empty lines with a single empty line in bash?

Question

I have a file that contains:

something



something else

something else again

I need a bash command, sed/grep w.e that will produce the fo

Answer 1

Usually, if I find that sed can't do something I need, I turn to awk:

awk '
BEGIN {
    blank = 0;
}

/^[[:blank:]]*$/ {
     if (!blank) {
          print;
     }
     blank = 1;
     next;
}

{
     print;
     blank = 0;
}' file