Shell Programming and Scripting

If you know that you have a file that is supposed to be a text file but is missing the newline that should be at the end of the file, the easy way to fix it is:

Code:

echo >> file

Note that Scrutinizer's suggestion and juzz4fun's suggestion will work with some versions of awk, but not all. The standards don't define the behavior of awk when the last line is not terminated by a <newline> character. I know that some existing versions of awk would produce the same results as wc by itself and others would produce the number you wanted. Others could do anything they want to do (such as terminate with an error message and write nothing to standard output) and still conform to the standards!

If some files are correctly formatted text files (with the trailing <newline>) and others are missing the trailing <newline>, but you know that there are always supposed to be 10 lines in the file, you could convert the incorrectly formatted files to correctly formatted text files using:

Code:

[ $(wc -l sample_file.txt) -eq 10 ] || echo >> sample_file.txt