Question

In count (non-blank) lines-of-code in bash they explain how to count the number of non-empty lines.

But is there a way to count the number of blank lines in a file? By blank line I also mean lines that have spaces in them.

Answer 1

Another way is:

grep -cvP '\S' file

• -P '\S'(perl regex) will match any line contains non-space
• -v select non-matching lines
• -c print a count of matching lines

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If your grep doesn’t support -P option, please use -E '[^[:space:]]'