Shell – How to Check if File is Empty or Only Contains Blank Characters

If you have column(1), an old BSD tool, try column -t, for pretty-printing tables.

To ensure empty cells are displayed, you could try the approach of inserting a single space in each empty cell (recognizable by two consecutive tabs). The idea is column(1) should give the space character its own column but being a single character in width it should not affect the table dimensions or be visible in the output to humans.

generate_tsv | 
   awk '/\t\t/ { for (i = 0; i < 2; i++) gsub(/\t\t/, "\t \t") } 1' | 
   column -t -s $'\t'

The extra awk inserted in the pipeline does the inserting of spaces into each empty cell, as described. 2 passes are necessary to handle 2 consecutive empty cells (\t\t\t).

It is not possible to have a file with an empty name. What you have is a file whose name entirely consists of blank or non-printable characters.

To see exactly what the file name is, run LC_CTYPE=C ls -b. This replaces all blank or non-printable characters by octal escapes. For example, a file whose name is a single zero-width space would be listed as \342\200\213.

You can isolate this file with a glob that excludes files with a nice name. For example, you could try listing the files whose name doesn't begin with a letter.

chaouche@karabeela /mnt/ubuntu/storage $ ls -d [^A-Za-z]*

Don't forget the option -d, so that ls lists the directory itself and not its contents.

You should rename the file to have a reasonable name. You can rely on your shell's completion, or use a glob that matches only this file.

mv [^A-Za-z]* windows-programs