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Re: [Wishlist] add option to cat to force final newline
From: |
Bob Proulx |
Subject: |
Re: [Wishlist] add option to cat to force final newline |
Date: |
Tue, 25 Oct 2005 12:56:48 -0600 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.9i |
Norbert Kiesel wrote:
> cat of a file without a '\n' as the last character results in the last
> line not shown in most shells (as it's overwritten with the shell
> prompt). I wonder if a patch for an option like --force-newline or so
> would be accepted, which would print a final newline if the last
> character is not one. Or is there already a way to get that behavior?
Thanks for filing that wishlist with the mailing list. But let me
kindly disagree.
The cat command is not truly a screen lister program. The cat command
concatenates files. We only use it for a screen lister sometimes
because we know that the file is small and we just want to splat it to
the screen. There are really too many options already to a simple
command like cat.
For a real screen lister program you should use more(1), less(1), or
even most(1). That is where all of those features such as adding a
newline to the end of files and such belong.
Besides, you can always run an echo after the cat command.
cat somefilewithoutnewline ; echo
Such as:
$ cat <(printf "hello\nthere")
hello
there$
$ cat <(printf "hello\nthere") ; echo
hello
there
$
Another besides, why would you be cat'ing a file to your terminal that
does not contain a newline? It is effectively binary data at that
point. Instead, put a newline in the file. :-) Plain text files
should always end with a newline. So the problem is really there.
Bob