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.

Solution 1

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

Solution 2

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

Comments

[don_crissti]

See also How can I double the newlines in an output stream...

[Janis]

Or this variant: awk 'ORS="\n\n\n\n\n\n"'

[Dani_l]

Or this variant: sed 's/$/\n\n\n\n\n/g' file

[cuonglm]

@Dani_l: It only works in GNU sed

[Dani_l]

@cuonglm didn't know that, thanks for the info. Which part is gnu specific? the \n in replacement?

[cuonglm]

@Dani_l: Yes, \n in the replacement part of s///.

[Peter.O]

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.

[cuonglm]

@Peter.O: Good point. Updated.