using grep or sed to find non blank lines not starting with ...

[blackbox111]

I am trying to use grep or sed to locate all nonblank lines that do not begin with a // /* or # in a file.

egrep ".+" will find all nonblank lines but I'm not sure about the rest

[lomcevak]

This should work:

egrep -v '(^//|^/\*|^#|^$|^[[:space:]]+$)'

[blackbox111]

it works thanks

correct me if I'm wrong but the :space: isn't nescecary. Also why did you put it inside two sets of [] ? The ^$ already checks to see if a line is empty.

[lomcevak]

With [[:space:]] the outer brackets indicate a 'bracket expression', the [:space:] is the syntax to look for spaces and TABs.

The ^$ checks for an empty line. If the a line has only spaces or TABs (ie: [:space:]) in it it wouldn't match.