trailing blank line in a text file

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Wed Jul 21 03:01:55 UTC 2004


On Tue, 2004-07-20 at 19:25, Robert Locke wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-07-20 at 21:39, Olga wrote:
> > No in vi and nano I do not see anything. But in gedit I see the following
> > (for example)
> > 
> > 1 Mike
> > 2 John
> > 3 Adam
> > 4
> > 
> > The above is an example of what a file looks like with lines numbered.
> > (numbers are not actually part of the file). I want the file to be only 3
> > lines long (as an example); however, what I get is 4 lines where line 4 is
> > an empty line. I can eliminate only using mc (F4). In nano, vim, vi it is
> > invisible, but in gedit (gui editor) it shows what I displayed above. I
> > can backspace after 4, it bring me to Adam, but when I save the file and
> > reopen it, the output is exactly the same as I am showing now (empty line
> > 4 stays).
> > 
> 
> Let's try a different approach....
> 
> After you save the file in whichever editor, can we confirm that it
> actually has the "four lines" or really just has "three lines"?
> 
> How about running "wc -l filename" and see how many lines it reports... 
> This will help to confirm for you whether the file truly has the blank
> line, or is just a visual construct of the editor.
----
You have a classic half full / half empty paradigm going here.

The point is that a large number of editors will add a LF to the end of
the file when it saves it. Thus, it doesn't put anything on the '4th'
line in this example, it only makes sure that line 3 ends with a LF
character. Whether you want to say that this file has 4 lines or 3 lines
is really a subjective matter. It definitely has 3 lines, each of them
ending with a LF character.

Craig





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