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.

Answer 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

Answer 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

Answer 3

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.