Shell Programming and Scripting

HI,

I want to find if the last character in a file (with many records i.e. many new line chars) is a new line \n or not?

Basically i want to know that if last line has a newline character at the end or not.

My purpose is:
cat in.dat | while IFS= read linex
do
echo $linex
echo "$linex" > tt.1
x=`cat tt.1 | wc -c`
echo "Length=$x"
done
rm -f tt.1

My in.dat file has 11 records (11th rec without a new line)

This loop displays only 10 records

If the file contains 11 records in in.dat (last without a new line)
wc- l returns 10

Can anyone help?

Code:

tail -c 1 filename | od -x

gives you the last byte(s) of the file in hex