Split file by multiple line breaks

Question

Let's say you have the following input file

Some text. It may contain line
breaks.

Some other part of the text

Yet an other part of
the text

And you want to iterate each text part (seperated by two line breaks (\n\n)), so that in the first iteration I would only get:

Some text. It may contain line
breaks.

In the second iteration I would get:

Some other part of the text

And in the last iteration I would get:

Yet an other part of
the text

I tried this, but it doesn't seem to work because IFS only supports one character?

cat $inputfile | while IFS=$'\n\n' read part; do
  # do something with $part
done

Answer 1

This is the solution of anubhava in pure bash:

#!/bin/bash

COUNT=1; echo -n "$COUNT: "
while read LINE
do
    [ "$LINE" ] && echo "$LINE" || { (( ++COUNT )); echo -n "$COUNT: " ;}
done

Answer 2

Use awk with null RS:

awk '{print NR ":", $0}' RS= file
1: Some Text. It may contains line
breaks.
2: Some Other Part of the Text
3: Yet an other Part of
the Text

You can clearly see that your input file has 3 records now (each record is printed with record # in output).