On 8 Jan, Rod Butcher wrote: > Is there a standard for what comes after the last record in a file, on > Linux/Unix ?
The definition of a line of text in traditional Unix has always been, AFAIK, a sequence of characters up to a LF character. A text file is just a sequence of lines. Ergo, the last character must end with a LF if it is to be handled correctly by all Unix text processing utilities. Older (especially, non-GNU) utilities also had line length limits built in (e.g. shells still do, AFAIK). I'd say the KDE utility is doing the wrong thing, strictly speaking. There's probably a POSIX standard defining this stuff, but that doesn't say much if you're interested in portability with older systems. The closest you'd probably come (trying to think of a reference to back up my claims), would be a reference by Kernighan or Ritchie. (Maybe the C ref manual, or some of the older man pages for sed or sort.) The best hint I can find is a reference on p17 of the original C prog language i the context of a tutorial program: "Input lines are assumed to be terminated by the newline character \n which has been religiously appended to every line written out." But that's only a hint. luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
