[macintux]

Does an empty file contain characters? That first sentence seems like it contradicts itself.

[brianpan]

Yes. It contains zero characters.

An empty file actually contains zero of everything in the universe.

[dfox]

The idea behind the definition is that it defines set of files that will not trigger various bugs in traditional unix text tools implementations (ie. various variants of not checking the fgets() return value).

[nerdponx]

I think the implication is that empty files are considered text files.