Removing trailing / starting newlines with sed, awk, tr, and friends

Question

I would like to remove all of the empty lines from a file, but only when they are at the end/start of a file (that is, if there are no non-empty lines before them, at the start;

Answer 1

I'd like to introduce another variant for gawk v4.1+

result=($(gawk '
    BEGIN {
        lines_count         = 0;
        empty_lines_in_head = 0;
        empty_lines_in_tail = 0;
    }
    /[^[:space:]]/ {
        found_not_empty_line = 1;
        empty_lines_in_tail  = 0;
    }
    /^[[:space:]]*?$/ {
        if ( found_not_empty_line ) {
            empty_lines_in_tail ++;
        } else {
            empty_lines_in_head ++;
        }
    }
    {
        lines_count ++;
    }
    END {
        print (empty_lines_in_head " " empty_lines_in_tail " " lines_count);
    }
' "$file"))

empty_lines_in_head=${result[0]}
empty_lines_in_tail=${result[1]}
lines_count=${result[2]}

if [ $empty_lines_in_head -gt 0 ] || [ $empty_lines_in_tail -gt 0 ]; then
    echo "Removing whitespace from \"$file\""
    eval "gawk -i inplace '
        {
            if ( NR > $empty_lines_in_head && NR <= $(($lines_count - $empty_lines_in_tail)) ) {
                print
            }
        }
    ' \"$file\""
fi