View Config Files Without Comments

I've been using this grep invocation to trim comments out of config files.Comments are useful, but when you want to just get the active configuration entries alone from a long file ( may be of 1000 lines where the config entries will be around 50 lines only ), use the below technique.

$ grep ^[^#] /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

The regex ^[^#] matches the first character of any line, as long as that character that is not a #. Because blank lines don't have a first character they're not matched either, resulting in a nice compact output of just the active configuration lines.