UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a file called products.kp which contains, for example,

12345678,1^M
87654321,2^M
13579123,3

when I run the command

cat products.kp| sed -f kp.sed

where kp.sed contains

s,^M,,

I get the output

12345678,1
87654321,2
13579123,3

so everything is ok.


However, when I run this command on another unix box, I get the output

12345678,1
87654321,2

ie. I don't get the last line returned.

has anyone any idea why? or a different way to do it in sed?

Thanks

ps. I'm using Sco and Bourne shell

If you have accurately described the situation, your version of sed has a bug. Complain to your vendor.

However, note that sed is line based. A line is a sequence of characters followed by a newline character. The last character of your file must be a newline character. If this is not the case, the results are undefined and both versions of sed are working correctly.

Thanks,

the file does always have a missing ^M on the last line. Is there any way I can get around this?

To give you a brief outline, the suppliers of the package that produces this file for our system have done a new release which produces the file as described (whereas it used to have a ^M on every line).

On our system, which is released across 220 unix boxes, I run the 'sed -f kp.sed' command, so the only thing I can realistically change is the contents of kp.sed (maybe to append a ^M to every line then substitute it for '' ?)

or am I done for & will just have to wait for their fix to their system?

I'm not really following you, but here are some comments that might clear up some confusion.

A control M in not a newline character. Control M's are not required in a line. If you have a text file that is missing the last newline character, you can append one with:
echo >> file

How many lines does "wc -l" find in your file?

To get rid of Control M's, you may have a program called dos2unix. You can also use "tr -d". And there are other solution that have been mentioned before as a substitute for dos2unix. You might try our search function since they have been mentioned before.

I've sorted it now, I ended up using dtox & then echoing it to a file like you suggested. This sort of thing

>$1.okp
dtox $1.kp > $1.dtox
for line in `cat $1.dtox`
do
echo $line >> $1.okp
done

Have to release a patch over 220 boxes now though!

Thanks for all your help.