Hi ,
I am using SUN OS Version 5.6.
I have a file that contains records of length 270. when I do 'set nu' in vi editor, I get the count as 86. whereas when I do "wc -l" on the command prompt, it shows the count as only 85. this is very strange. why would the 'wc' show 1 record less. The job that processed the file shows in the log that it loaded 86 records.
I checked the last record in that file and it is exactly the same as the other records and of same record length.

can anyone answer my question pls.

My guess is that the last record in your file does not contain a newline character after it.

For example, if you type echo -n "hi" > someFile and then try wc -l someFile it'll show the file as having 0 lines, since the -n option doesn't put a newline character at the end of the line.

And when you vi your file, you should see something like "yourFile" [Incomplete last line] ... at the bottom of the screen. You could fix this by running a command like echo >> yourFile.

I would try this to get rid of any blank lines.


grep -v ^$ file.in > file.out



Then use file.out for your testing.

Use a set list within vi to see special characters. You could also do an od -c file to take a look at the contents to see if you are missing the last terminating newline.

Cheers,

Keith