I recently had to install a couple of squid servers to act as reverse proxies for a webcluster. You can teach the squid server to stand in between in the end users and the webservers, and to store all the static content ( .jpg .flv .css .htm for example ) in the RAM. This saves a lot of I/O and bandwidth on the webservers, and it can really speeds up a site. And the end of the road the webservers' load dropped with 92%. But before all this worked, I had to run through a massive config file and since the squid config file is their manual at the same time, it's about 5000 lines long. So I had to find out a way to filter only the important settings from the config file.

This is what i came up with:

cat /etc/squid/squid.conf | egrep -v "(^#.*|^$)"

Explained

egrep -v      means leave the following out
^#.*          means patterns that begin with a #
|             means or
^$            means patterns that are empty

Updates

update #1

Thanks to an insightfull comment by Darwin Award Winner on this article, here's a version that would also filter comments with spaces before the #, such as comments that are indented with code blocks:

cat /etc/squid/squid.conf | egrep -v "^\s*(#|$)"

Thanks Darwin!