Fischer, Topher wrote:
> 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 area.
> --------------------

FYI:

This problem does not happen with bash, sh, csh, tcsh, or ksh.  zsh is 
the devil.

--Topher

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