On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 6:07 PM, Topher Fischer <[email protected]> wrote:
> Andrew McNabb wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 04:32:26PM -0700, Fischer, Topher wrote:
>>> My co-worker just discovered a file on one of our boxes that contains data, 
>>> but when you cat it, it looks like it's empty.
>>>
>>> Any ideas on what's going on here?
>>
>> If it uses "\r" line endings (Mac style), it's possible that the
>> terminal keeps on drawing over the same line.  Could something like that
>> be it?  Do you have any more information about the data in the file?
>>
>
> The contents of the file seem to be unrelated.  The contents are just
> 'root', and I can see with hexdump that there are no other contents:
>
> 00000000  72 6f 6f 74                                       |root|
> 00000004
>
> SELinux is disabled.
>
> I can see the contents with vim, less, hexdump, etc.  But I can't see
> them with cat.  I cannot see them if I do:
>        perl -e "print while <>;" filename
>
>
> I'm baffled.

How about:

cat filename; echo

If there's no trailing newline, your prompt might interfere
with/overwrite the last line of the file. This command prints an extra
line after running cat. Unix files are usually expected to end with \n
but Windows files usually don't. (That's why diff says "No newline at
end of file.")

-- 
Peter Henderson
[email protected]
--------------------
BYU Unix Users Group 
http://uug.byu.edu/ 

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