Line Eater

16 October, 2008

Summary

Line Eater is a simple Windows command line application to remove lines from the start of any file. I use it in a batch file to process the deployment of a large web application.

Download

LineEater.zip 4KB

Requires Windows and .NET Framework 3.5.

Extract the .exe file. Put it somewhere and it to the Windows path variable or put it in the folder you will run it from. I have it in a folder with a batch file I use to copy the web application then run LineEater and some other tools on the copy.

Example

Command

C:\LineEater input.txt output.txt 2

input.txt

This is line 1
The second line
Hi, I'm line 3
Followed by line four

output.css

Hi, I'm line 3
Followed by line four

Batch file

Here is how you could use it in a batch file to strip the first 3 lines from each JS file in a folder:

@echo off
FOR %%f IN (*.js) DO (
 LineEater %%f %%f.temp 3
 move %%f.temp %%f
)

Just paste it into an empty text file and give the file a .bat extension. I use similar code in a larger batch file as one step of several.

Notes

If you ommit the count parameter it will strip 1 line.
I use this after JSMin because for some reason it ads blank lines to the start of my JavaScript files. That was never a big problem until recently since that line seems to crash the page's JavaScript in Google Chrome.
I prefer Mac. This was needed for a Windows app therefore it is a Windows app. If you want to make a version for another OS let me know (see link at bottom of page) and I'll send you the source code.
LineEater.exe FCIV checksum 3cea7d3199ca8b53a9719671d4877dc4

License and disclaimer

Download and use this for free. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License which means you can use it for pretty much anything.

I offer no support, guarantees, or warrantee. Use at your own peril. All I can say is it works for me.