Norbert Kiesel wrote: > cat of a file without a '\n' as the last character results in the last > line not shown in most shells (as it's overwritten with the shell > prompt). I wonder if a patch for an option like --force-newline or so > would be accepted, which would print a final newline if the last > character is not one. Or is there already a way to get that behavior?
Thanks for filing that wishlist with the mailing list. But let me kindly disagree. The cat command is not truly a screen lister program. The cat command concatenates files. We only use it for a screen lister sometimes because we know that the file is small and we just want to splat it to the screen. There are really too many options already to a simple command like cat. For a real screen lister program you should use more(1), less(1), or even most(1). That is where all of those features such as adding a newline to the end of files and such belong. Besides, you can always run an echo after the cat command. cat somefilewithoutnewline ; echo Such as: $ cat <(printf "hello\nthere") hello there$ $ cat <(printf "hello\nthere") ; echo hello there $ Another besides, why would you be cat'ing a file to your terminal that does not contain a newline? It is effectively binary data at that point. Instead, put a newline in the file. :-) Plain text files should always end with a newline. So the problem is really there. Bob _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
