Peter Henderson wrote:
> 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.")
> 
Bingo!

You, sir, get the donut.

Disclaimer: Donuts are only redeemable at Top-Pot donut locations in the 
   Seattle downtown are.
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