Find out white space or blank space in any file abc.txt or abc.xml

[jeesshnasree]

Hi all,

 could you please let me know for find/check white or blank space in a file.

how to view line number in file.xxx without open the the file.xxx with vi editor  

i am waiting for your valuable reply 

[DavidOBrien]

`egrep -n [[:space:]] filename`

You might need to update that depending on what type of whitespace you want to find.

hth

David

[jeesshnasree]

hi David,

could you please any example . actually i tried your command and output not able to understand.

thanks for your help.

[DavidOBrien · Accepted solution]

For this example file:

$ cat my-script
# The first line of text
# The second line
ALineWithNoSpaces
More spaces here
NoSpaces

I run the following command, and get the subsequent output:

$ egrep -n [[:space:]] my-script
1:# The first line of text
2:# The second line
4:More spaces here

Lines 1, 2, & 4 have spaces, but lines 3 & 5 do not. You don't need to open an editor, as you requested. For other types of white space, you'll need to modify [[:space:]]

Hope this helps

David

[jeesshnasree]

Thanks David

[Scott · Accepted solution]

Take the cat to the vet!

cat -vet <filename>

It'll show you special characters for non-space whitespace, like ^T for tab and the like.  Anything that's an actual space will be shown as a space.  

I wish I had known about cat -vet as an undergrad comp-sci student.  I spent hours and hours going through a several thousand line long c program to find a ^G once using octal dump (od -c), it was quite painful, where as cat -vet would have been much faster and easier.

-STM

[jeesshnasree]

finally thanks Scott . it seems working