remove final \n from file

[kasparov]

Hi

I have a file which came out of our application - the final line of this file *should* end with \r\f.

Unfortunately I needed to edit the file (in vi) which puts an additional \n on the end of the file - so now it ends \r\f\n. My question is how can I remove the final \n.

I know I could use tr to remove (or change) all \n's & I expect I could use sed to remove this char but I don't know how to - any ideas?

Thanks, Chris

 

[kasparov]

For info - we needed to do this pretty quickly & we discovered that the final char could be removed in Notepad - so I ftp'd it to Windows & back.

But a solution which a colleague found was:

echo `cat <myfile>|tail -1`\\c

This edits the final line OK - so if we needed to automate it we could run head on the file for all except the last line, then run this command & then cat them together.

Hopefully we won't need to do it again though ...

Chris

 

[Annihilannic]

Something like this perhaps:

$ head -$(ls -l sourcefile | awk '{print $5-1}')c sourcefile > destfile

Although head on some operating systems appends a \n even when used in byte count mode... the above worked on Linux with the GNU head.

Annihilannic.

 

[bigoldbulldog]

Here's a way if you want to remove the terminal byte:

dd if=inputfile ibs=1 count=$(expr "$(wc -c foo)" : "\([^ ]*\)*" - 1) of=outputfile

Cheers,
ND