UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

im doing a

Code:

while read file
do
<code>

done < file > output

loop.

however i have a list of text with 4 columns each. And i have successfully organised it the way i wanted to the output. It's almost perfect but it doesn't read the last line if the last is not followed by a newline character.

example

Code:

4324325 3 4 0
4324344 3 4 4
3432434 1 2 2

output

Code:

4324325 3 4 0
4324344 3 4 4

So is there a way to detect the EOF with sed? I will probably want to add a newline before i output it to a new file.

---------- Post updated at 02:52 AM ---------- Previous update was at 02:25 AM ----------

here's my attempt at it. i tried adding multiple \n at the end but it only did one?

Code:

cat temp3 | sed "s/ [0-10]{0,2}$/[0-10]{0,2}$\n /"

Why not simply use:

Code:

cat file|while read Line
do
<code>

done

Before you run your while/read loop on the file you could add the missing \n in the last line with:

Code:

sed '$s/$/\n/g' infile

And no need to cat files into tools, that can read files their own or by redirection

Alternatively:

Code:

(cat file;echo)|while read line
do
   <code>
done > output

edit: Hmm, this doesn't work. Scrutinizer got it right in the next posting.

How about:

Code:

while read line || [ -n "$line" ]
do 
  <code> 
done < file > output

I think this works for both eol and non-eol terminated files

oops sorry. I'm not allowed to use cat. I just used it above so that i would output the result to the screen instead of m opening up the file.

i used

Code:

sed '$s/$/\n/g' infile

but i get an extra character n printed for some reason.

---------- Post updated at 05:13 AM ---------- Previous update was at 05:10 AM ----------

sorry that didn't work. I'm still missing my last row.

Strange I tested it and it worked everytime... Could you do an od -c or od -a of your input file and post the last line?