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awkgawk
CaitlinG
CaitlinG

Reputation: 2015

Finding blank lines in a file with awk

My apologies for such a rudimentary question, but I am attempting to count the number of blank lines in a text file with awk. This is NOT a homework assignment. Windows 10. Gawk 4.1.3

BEGIN { x=0 } 
/^$/  { x=x+1 } 
END   { print "I found " x " blank lines." }

The output is always: I found 0 blank lines.

Thanks.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1700

Answers (2)

hek2mgl
hek2mgl

Reputation: 157967

The command should work but you can skip the initialization of x. awk will do it for you automatically. You can use the NF variable for that check, if it is 0 which evaluates to false the line is empty. Furthermore I suggest to use printf:

!NF  {x++}
END  {printf "I found %d blank lines\n", x}

Btw, you can simply use grep

grep -ch '^$' file

-c outputs only the count of occurrences found, -h suppresses the output of the file name.

Use command substitution to interpolate the output into an echo statement:

echo "I found $(grep -ch '^$' file) blank lines"

Upvotes: 5

Мона_Сах
Мона_Сах

Reputation: 322

Apart from the nice awk solution you've already got, the sed solution would be

sed -n '/^$/p' file |wc -l

Here -n suppresses the normal output, p prints the lines the line is blank - (^$). wc -l counts the total number of lines thus printed.

Upvotes: 1

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