I'm opening this issue because:

• npm is crashing.
• npm is producing an incorrect install.
• npm is doing something I don't understand.
• Other (see below for feature requests):

What's going wrong?

If package-lock.json is empty, npm crashes with: Unexpected end of JSON input

How can the CLI team reproduce the problem?

1. Install in a project normally
2. Delete all content of package.json
3. npm i

https://gist.github.com/JoshuaKGoldberg/74c591fa1d55462a2d290dd5dcae3051

supporting information:

• npm -v prints: 5.5.1
• node -v prints: 8.8.1
• npm config get registry prints:
• Windows, OS X/macOS, or Linux?: Windows 10 with cmder

Extra relevant because of #18131