How will you list only the empty lines in a file (using grep)?

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giri

  • Jul 9th, 2005
 

grep -c "^$" filename.txt  

Pallavii Potdaar

  • Feb 15th, 2006
 

grep "^[      ]*$" filename.txt

In character set (between [ and ] one space and tab is given)

this command will gives all the blank line including those having space and tabs (if pressed)only

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Vivek12

  • Jun 4th, 2008
 

We can do this efficiently through awk script

awk '{
        if (NF == 0)
        {
          print "Here comes the empty line"
          print $0
        }
     }' filename

NF=number of fields in the current line
$0=current line

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my_thoughts

  • Feb 14th, 2010
 

Below method tries to answer the question without using grep.

step1) sort -o < filename | tee filename | uniq -c
Now the input file-filename is sorted and output gives the number of blank lines. If b is the number of blank lines, then

step2) head -b filename

Please correct me if i am wrong

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amitkshirsagar

  • Jul 16th, 2011
 

You can following commands:
grep '^$' ### Will just show you all the blank lines -- not much useful
grep -c '^$' ##### will give you total count of number of blank lines
grep -n '^$' #### This will show all the blank lines along with their line numbers ... useful

karthikeyan

  • Jul 23rd, 2011
 

grep -c "^$" file name
here -c option count the no.of empty line..the anchors denotes the empty line from your file name

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Mo

  • Apr 20th, 2012
 

grep "^$" filename

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Sanjeev

  • Apr 3rd, 2015
 

sed /^$/ !d filename
or
sed -n /^$/p filename

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rahul

  • May 8th, 2015
 

I think it would be better to use this.
sed -n /^$/p shit.txt |wc -l

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ishaan

  • Sep 27th, 2015
 

grep ^$

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Neha

  • Nov 5th, 2015
 

grep -c ^$ filename

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Sumit Burnwal

  • Feb 3rd, 2016
 

$ grep ^$ filename

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ansuman

  • Feb 20th, 2016
 

$grep -c "^$" file

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uma

  • May 24th, 2016
 

$grep -n ^$ file1.txt

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mallikarjuna reddy

  • Jul 23rd, 2019
 

grep -n ^$ file1.txt this command will give the all empty lines numbers display
grep -n ^$ file1.txt | wc -l this command will give the all empty lines number counts in file

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Sathish Krishnan Venkatachalam

  • Aug 7th, 2020
 

grep "^$" file.txt

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