Not able to skip blank lines in a shell script

Question

I am reading a text file line by line and taking the count of all lines as a part of my requirement.

When there is blank line then it get messed up. I tried with if condition for [ -z "$line" ] , however not able to succeed.

Here is my current code:

countNumberOfCases() {
echo "2.  Counting number of test cases -----------"
    cd $SCRIPT_EXECUTION_DIR
    FILE_NAME=Features
    while read line || [[ -n "$line" ]]
    do
        TEST_CASE="$line"                       
        if [ "${TEST_CASE:0:1}" != "#" ] ; then
            cd $MVN_EXECUTION_DIR
                runTestCase     
        fi
    done < $FILE_NAME

    echo " v_ToalNoOfCases : = " $v_ToalNoOfCases
}

And below is Features file

web/sprintTwo/TC_002_MultipleLoginScenario.feature
#web/sprintOne/TC_001_SendMoneyTransaction_Spec.feature

web/sprintTwo/TC_003_MultipleLoginScenario.feature
#web/sprintOne/TC_004_SendMoneyTransaction_Spec.feature

When there is blank line it wont work properly so my requirement is that if there is blank line then it should be skipped and should not get considered.

codeforester · Accepted Answer · 2018-05-04T13:03:57.360

You can write your loop in a little more robust way:

#!/bin/bash

while read -r line || [[ $line ]]; do                                 # read lines one by one
  cd "$mvn_execution_dir" # make sure this is an absolute path
                          # or move it outside the loop unless "runTestCase" function changes the current directory
  runTestCase "$line"     # need to pass the argument?
done < <(sed -E '/^[[:blank:]]*$/d; /^[[:blank:]]+#/d' "$file_name")  # strip blanks and comments

A few things:

get your script checked at shellcheck for common mistakes
see this post for proper variable naming convention:

Correct Bash and shell script variable capitalization
see this discussion about [ vs [[ in Bash

Test for non-zero length string in Bash: [ -n “$var” ] or [ “$var” ]
about reading lines from a text file

Looping through the content of a file in Bash

Should the `cd "$mvn_execution_dir"` not be done outside of the loop? I'm thinking of the case where `mvn_execution_dir` holds a relative path. — user1934428, May 04 '18 at 06:07
It's working fine. Thanks for sharing important information as well. — Durgesh, May 04 '18 at 06:17

Not able to skip blank lines in a shell script

1 Answers1