How to insert multiple blank lines after every line

Question

I want to insert 5 blank lines after every line in my input file.

foo.txt:

line 1
line 2
line 3

out.txt:

line 1





line 2





line 3    





...

Solaris 5.10, nawk or sed.

See also [How can I double the newlines in an output stream](http://unix.stackexchange.com/q/165766)... — don_crissti, Jun 05 '15 at 19:23

cuonglm · Answer 1 · 2015-06-18T01:20:48.373

16

That's the job for sed:

sed -e 'G;G;G;G;G' file

With awk:

nawk -vORS='\n\n\n\n\n\n' 1 file

Or shorter version:

awk 'ORS="\n\n\n\n\n\n"' file

or avoid setting ORS for each input line:

awk 'BEGIN{ORS="\n\n\n\n\n\n"};1' file

edited Jun 18 '15 at 01:20

answered Jun 05 '15 at 19:13

cuonglm

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Or this variant: `awk 'ORS="\n\n\n\n\n\n"'` – Janis Jun 06 '15 at 07:55
Or this variant: `sed 's/$/\n\n\n\n\n/g' file` – Dani_l Jun 07 '15 at 14:56
@Dani_l: It only works in GNU sed – cuonglm Jun 07 '15 at 14:57
@cuonglm didn't know that, thanks for the info. Which part is gnu specific? the \n in replacement? – Dani_l Jun 07 '15 at 14:58
@Dani_l: Yes, `\n` in the replacement part of `s///`. – cuonglm Jun 07 '15 at 15:00
`awk 'ORS="\n\n\n\n\n\n"'` may be shorter (good for golfing, and handy-ish for quick one-offs), but it is unnecessarily setting a variable for every record it processes. – Peter.O Jun 18 '15 at 00:46
@Peter.O: Good point. Updated. – cuonglm Jun 18 '15 at 01:21

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 07 '15 at 12:26

1

Another one , with printf

cat file.txt | xargs printf "%s\n\n\n\n\n"

To output that to a file

(cat file.txt | xargs printf "%s\n\n\n\n\n") > out.txt

answered Jun 07 '15 at 12:26

Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 07 '15 at 13:49

You might want to use nl for this, too. It comes to my mind because when I do stuff like that I often find it useful to retain the original line-numbers.

eval "nl -ba -s'$(printf "\n\n\n\n\n'")" <infile

Also pr is spec'd for the -doublespace argument - which will double all newlines in input on output.

But sed's good, too.

How to insert multiple blank lines after every line

3 Answers3

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