Reputation: 6037

How to append an empty line in a text file using the command line?

How do I append an empty line in a text file using the command line?

 echo hi >a.txt
    echo >>a.txt
    echo arun >>a.txt

Here the output comes as:

hi
echo on
arun

So how could I append an empty line? I want it to be like this:

hi

arun

When I added this line on code @echo off, it said echo off. How can it be done?

Upvotes: 21

Answers (4)

Santi

Reputation: 11

I've battling with this for a while here's a tip of how i fixed it:

On you batch, put "echo(>> textfile.txt" (without quotation) without spaces between the echo command and the redirector or you'll get a line with a space. Not ideal if you're compiling a file to paste somewhere like excel and need the cell to be empty like i did for whatever reason.

Hope it helps.

Upvotes: 1

Michael Myers

Reputation: 191905

In the Windows command prompt, try:

echo.>> a.txt

Note that there is no space between echo and .; if there is one, it will output a dot. There is also no space between the . and the >>; anything in between would be output to the file, even whitespace characters.

See the Microsoft documentation for echo.

If this were in bash, your first try would have been correct:

echo >> a.txt

But in Windows, the unqualified echo command tests whether there is a command prompt or not (echo off turns the prompt off and echo on turns it back on).

Upvotes: 37