Count the number of blank lines at the end of file

Question

I have a file with blank lines at the end of the file. Can I use grep to count the number of blank lines at the end of the file with the file name being passed as variable in the script?

Answer 1

If the blank lines are only at the end

grep  -c '^$' myFile

or:

grep -cx '' myFile

Answer 2

Just for fun, some spooky sed:

#!/bin/sh
sed '/./!H;//h;$!d;//d;x;s/\n//' "$1" | wc -l

Explanation:

• /./ addresses lines with any character, so /./! addresses empty lines (like /^$/, but I want to reuse the opposite pattern); for those, the H command append them to the hold space. Thus, if for each empty line we have added one line to the hold space, there is always one more line than the number of empty lines. We'll care for that later.
• //h the empty pattern matches the last regular expression , which was any character, so any non-empty line is addressed and moved to the hold space by the h command to "reset" the collected lines to 1. When the next empty line will get appended, there will be two again, as expected.
• $!d stops the script without output for every but the last line, so further commands are only executed after the last line. So whatever empty lines we collected in the hold space are at the end of the file. Good.
• //d: The d command is again executed for non-empty lines only. So if the last line was not empty, sed will exit without any output. Zero lines. Good.
• x exchanges hold space and pattern space, so the collected lines are in the pattern space now to be processed.
• But we remember that there is one line too much, so we reduce it by removing one newline with s/\n//.
• Voilà! The number of lines matches the number of empty lines at the end (note that the first line will not be empty, but who cares), so we can count them with wc -l.

Answer 3

Some more GNU tac/tail -r options:

tac file | awk 'NF{exit};END{print NR?NR-1:0}'

Or:

tac file | sed -n '/[^[:blank:]]/q;p' | wc -l

Note that on the output of:

printf 'x\n '

That is, where there is an extra space after the last full line (which some could consider as an extra blank line, but by the POSIX definition of text, is not valid text), those would give 0.

POSIXly:

awk 'NF{n=NR};END{print NR-n}' < file

but that means reading the file in full (tail -r/tac would read the file backward from the end on seekable files). That gives 1 on the output of printf 'x\n '.

Answer 4

Another awk solution. This variation resets the counter k each time there is a non-blank line. Then, every line increments the counter. (So, after the first non-blank length line, k==0.) At the end we output the number of lines we have counted.

Prepare the data file

cat <<'X' >input.txt
aaa

bbb
ccc



X

Count the trailing blank lines in the sample

awk 'NF {k=-1}; {k++}; END {print k+0}' input.txt
3

In this definition, a blank line might contain spaces or other blank characters; it's still blank. If you really want to count empty lines rather than blank lines, change NF for $0 != "".

Answer 5

As you are actually asking for a grep solution I add this one relying only on GNU grep (okay, also using shell syntax and echo ...):

#!/bin/sh
echo $(( $(grep -c "" "$1") - $(grep -B$(grep -cv . "$1") . "$1" |grep -c "") ))

What am I doing here? $(grep -c ".*" "$1") counts all lines in the file, then we substract the file without the trailing empty lines.

And how to get those? $(grep -B42 . "$1" would grep all non-empty-lines and 42 lines before them, so it would print everything until the last non-empty line, as long as there are not more than 42 consecutive empty lines before a non-empty line. To avoid that limit, I take $(grep -cv . "$1") as the parameter for the -B option, which is the total number of empty lines, so always big enough. This way I have stripped the trailing empty lines and can use |grep -c ".*" to count the lines.

Brilliant, isn't it? (-;

Answer 6

to count the number of consecutive blank lines at the end of the file

Solid awk + tac solution:

Sample input.txt:

$ cat input.txt
aaa

bbb
ccc



$  # command line 

---

The action:

awk '!NF{ if (NR==++c) { cnt++ } else exit }END{ print int(cnt) }' <(tac input.txt)

• !NF - ensures the current line is empty (has no fields)
• NR==++c - ensuring the consecutive order of blank lines. (NR - record number, ++c - evenly incremented auxiliary counter)
• cnt++ - counter of blank lines

---

The output:

3

Answer 7

IIUC, the following script called count-blank-at-the-end.sh would do the job:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

count=$(tail -n +"$(grep . "$1" -n | tail -n 1 | cut -d: -f1)" "$1" | wc -l)
num_of_blank_lines=$((count - 1))

printf "%s\n" "$num_of_blank_lines"

Example usage:

$ ./count-blank-at-the-end.sh FILE
4

I tested it in GNU bash, Android mksh and in ksh.

Answer 8

Alternative Python solution:

Sample input.txt:

$ cat input.txt
aaa

bbb
ccc



$  # command line 

---

The action:

python -c 'import sys, itertools; f=open(sys.argv[1]);
lines=list(itertools.takewhile(str.isspace, f.readlines()[::-1]));
print(len(lines)); f.close()' input.txt

The output:

3

---

https://docs.python.org/3/library/itertools.html?highlight=itertools#itertools.takewhile