OS X (Apple)

Give this a try.. And yes, it's kind've a kludge...

cat foo|echo >>foobar
cat bar|echo >>foobar

Echo should add a line terminator at the end of each file....

But what I'm suspecting is that these files are kinda munged in the first place. Since they're delimited, you could open them up in a oocalc and import them. Then reopend the oocalc file and export it back out to | delimited.

Then give your cat foo bar >>foobar a try...

Also, cat -A should show you all non-printing characters which (in theory) should tell all.

Scott M

cat FirstLine.txt|echo >> new.txt

results in an empty text file... am I reading your advice correctly?

New development...
I found this line of code and figured that if cat wasn't going to cooperate, I'll just put my first line right into the script:

(echo '0a'; echo 'first line of text'; echo '.'; echo 'wq') | ed -s readyToProcess.txt

The resulting file was double-spaced, like I described earlier: I created a new text file called test.txt that looked like this: and ran:

(echo '0a'; echo 'first line of text'; echo '.'; echo 'wq') | ed -s test.txt

and it worked. So Scott, I think you're right, I think there is an issue of some sort with the datafeed file. I ran file readyToProcess.txt and it came back with readyToProcess.txt: ASCII English text, with very long lines, with CRLF line terminators

I think maybe I'm on to something?

Success!
I ran:

tr -d '\r' < readyToProcess.txt > ready2.txt

on my datafeed file, then:


(echo '0a'; echo 'first line of text'; echo '.'; echo 'wq') | ed -s ready2.txt

and all is well. I've got it integrated and working in my script now. Thank you so much for your help guys!!!