On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 03:28:02PM +0100, Stephane Chazelas wrote: > 2016-04-13 08:55:16 -0400, Greg Wooledge: > [...] > > > And if you want to keep eventual spurious characters after the > > > last NL character in the file: > > > > > > while IFS= read -r line; do printf '%s\n' "$line"; done < test.txt > > > [ -z "$line" ] || printf %s "$line" > > > > Another way to write that is: > > > > while IFS= read -r line || [[ $line ]]; do ... done < test.txt > [...] > > Except that it would add an extra newline character (which may > be desired as well).
I'm assuming you're using the input in some way, not just dumping it back out. If all you want is to dump the input back out to stdout, the correct way to write that is: cat In a loop that does something nontrivial to the input, treating each line of input as a data item to be processed after removing any trailing newlines, the way I wrote it is preferred because it lets you avoid writing the big complicated loop body twice. (Or moving the loop body to a function, which you then call from two different places.)
