remove all lines from a text file starting at first empty line

Question

What is the best way to remove all lines from a text file starting at first empty line in Bash? External tools (awk, sed...) can be used!

Example

1:          


        

Answer 1

Another awk would be:

awk -vRS= '1;{exit}' file

By setting the record separator RS to be an empty string, we define the records as paragraphs separated by a sequence of empty lines. It is now easily to adapt this to select the nth block as:

awk -vRS= '(FNR==n){print;exit}' file

There is a problem with this method when processing files with a DOS line-ending (CRLF). There will be no empty lines as there will always be a CR in the line. But this problem applies to all presented methods.