Re: Trailing LFs in shell scripts
Re: Trailing LFs in shell scripts
- Subject: Re: Trailing LFs in shell scripts
- From: John W Baxter <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 19:15:41 -0800
At 18:59 -0800 11/17/2002, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>
>>>>> "Philip" == Philip Aker <email@hidden> writes:
>
>
Philip> On Saturday, Nov 16, 2002, at 18:47 US/Pacific, Axel Luttgens wrote:
>
>> And a file just consisting of sequence "abc" is just a malformed
>
>> text file.
>
>
Philip> I don't think that's strictly true. I believe unix tools also consider
>
Philip> EOF and possibly EOS as a valid terminator. That's what all the
>
Philip> beginner C lessons would have one account for.
>
>
No. A "unix tool" will read to "end-of-file", which is not indicated
>
by anything *in* the file, but rather by the meta information in the
>
inode. The bytes "abc" would be a completely valid file, although
>
many tools will probably rewrite it to "abc\n" if they are working
>
in a line-oriented fashion.
Time to go off list. ;-)
Not tacking a trailing newline onto the last "line" in a file is a great
way to have that line missed. (In a far wider context than old Perl
versions ;-))
On the systems I drive (oldish BSDi, oldish and newish Linux), hosts.allow
and hosts.deny and crontab are examples of such files. I tend to put a
comment at the ends of configuration files these days, saying to put new
stuff above this line. It doesn't matter whether THAT has a trailing
newline or not...it's ignored either way. I did the crontab error most
recently within the last month.
--John (whose global deny at the end of hosts.deny once failed to deny
anything for want of a newline...fortunately I tested and was merely
confused for a while...my normal state anyhow)
--
John Baxter email@hidden Port Ludlow, WA, USA
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