search for blank lines with awk
 

Hi!!

I'm new at this :(
I'm trying to make a program to search for each blank line in a text archive, where blocks are separated by this blank lines. I want to write the number of the line in a new file "numblank.txt"

I have this, but I think I have a problem with the "blank line" simbol.
Can anyone help me please?

awk '{if ($1 == /^$/) print NR }' $file1 >! numblank.tmp


where file1 is given as:

text
text

text
text
text
text

text
text (blocks are uneven)


Thank you!!!

Hi,

welcome to LQ!

What do you consider to be "the blank line symbol"? In most shells
I'm aware of an exclamation mark is a history expansion command;
what you're trying to achieve should work fine if you omit the '!'.



Cheers,
Tink

Hi Tinker,
I meant the /^$/ by "blank symbol".

I'll try without the exclamation symbol.... and, it doesn't work :(
But I found another way to write the script, thanks anyway :D

if you want "blank lines" (actually they are newlines), just check for no fields

sed -n '/^$/=' filename >> blankfile

This should also work.
awk '/^$/{print NR}' file > numfiles