A list of one-liners that selectively delete certain lines.
# print all of file EXCEPT section between 2 regular expressions
sed '/Iowa/,/Montana/d'
# delete duplicate, consecutive lines from a file (emulates "uniq").
# First line in a set of duplicate lines is kept, rest are deleted.
sed '$!N; /^\(.*\)\n\1$/!P; D'
# delete duplicate, nonconsecutive lines from a file. Beware not to
# overflow the buffer size of the hold space, or else use GNU sed.
sed -n 'G; s/\n/&&/; /^\([ -~]*\n\).*\n\1/d; s/\n//; h; P'
# delete all lines except duplicate lines (emulates "uniq -d").
sed '$!N; s/^\(.*\)\n\1$/\1/; t; D'
# delete the first 10 lines of a file
sed '1,10d'
# delete the last line of a file
sed '$d'
# delete the last 2 lines of a file
sed 'N;$!P;$!D;$d'
# delete the last 10 lines of a file
sed -e :a -e '$d;N;2,10ba' -e 'P;D' # method 1
sed -n -e :a -e '1,10!{P;N;D;};N;ba' # method 2
# delete every 8th line
gsed '0~8d' # GNU sed only
sed 'n;n;n;n;n;n;n;d;' # other seds
# delete ALL blank lines from a file (same as "grep '.' ")
sed '/^$/d' # method 1
sed '/./!d' # method 2
# delete all CONSECUTIVE blank lines from file except the first; also
# deletes all blank lines from top and end of file (emulates "cat -s")
sed '/./,/^$/!d' # method 1, allows 0 blanks at top, 1 at EOF
sed '/^$/N;/\n$/D' # method 2, allows 1 blank at top, 0 at EOF
# delete all CONSECUTIVE blank lines from file except the first 2:
sed '/^$/N;/\n$/N;//D'
# delete all leading blank lines at top of file
sed '/./,$!d'
# delete all trailing blank lines at end of file
sed -e :a -e '/^\n*$/{$d;N;ba' -e '}' # works on all seds
sed -e :a -e '/^\n*$/N;/\n$/ba' # ditto, except for gsed 3.02*
# delete the last line of each paragraph
sed -n '/^$/{p;h;};/./{x;/./p;}'