Re: [Nano-devel] Trailing returns

[John Gabriele]

On 4/18/07, Marcus Bointon <address@hidden> wrote:
> On quite a few occasions I've found the automatic addition of
> trailing returns to text files in nano to be a real pain. I found
> this message in the archives on the subject:
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-nano/2005-10/msg00009.html
>
> Can someone tell me why this is the default behaviour? I've googled
> for a reason but have not found one. Other editors I use don't do
> this, and I'd really prefer not to have to resort to futzing with sed
> to work around it.

I think I remember that some compilers will issue a warning if you
don't have a newline at the end of a file (with warnings turned up)...
Maybe this was for an old version of gcc -- not sure.

On GNU/Linux systems I've never seen a problem that was caused by
having a newline at the end of a file. I once worked on a old brittle
DOS program that barfed on a config file because of this though.
Someone opened the config file, made a tiny trivial change, closed and
saved (their editor added a final newline), and then the program
wouldn't read the config file anymore. That was pretty funny actually
(after we figured it out). :)

---John