How can I delete a newline if it is the last chara

Question

I have some files that I'd like to delete the last newline if it is the last character in a file. od -c shows me that the command I run does write the file with a trailing new line:

0013600   n   t  >  \n

I've tried a few tricks with sed but the best I could think of isn't doing the trick:

sed -e '$s/\(.*\)\n$/\1/' abc

Any ideas how to do this?

Answer 1

This is a good solution if you need it to work with pipes/redirection instead of reading/output from or to a file. This works with single or multiple lines. It works whether there is a trailing newline or not.

# with trailing newline
echo -en 'foo\nbar\n' | sed '$s/$//' | head -c -1

# still works without trailing newline
echo -en 'foo\nbar' | sed '$s/$//' | head -c -1

# read from a file
sed '$s/$//' myfile.txt | head -c -1

Details:

• head -c -1 truncates the last character of the string, regardless of what the character is. So if the string does not end with a newline, then you would be losing a character.
• So to address that problem, we add another command that will add a trailing newline if there isn't one: sed '$s/$//' . The first $ means only apply the command to the last line. s/$// means substitute the "end of the line" with "nothing", which is basically doing nothing. But it has a side effect of adding a trailing newline is there isn't one.

Note: Mac's default head does not support the -c option. You can do brew install coreutils and use ghead instead.

Answer 2

Using dd:

file='/path/to/file'
[[ "$(tail -c 1 "${file}" | tr -dc '\n' | wc -c)" -eq 1 ]] && \
    printf "" | dd  of="${file}" seek=$(($(stat -f "%z" "${file}") - 1)) bs=1 count=1
    #printf "" | dd  of="${file}" seek=$(($(wc -c < "${file}") - 1)) bs=1 count=1

Answer 3

The only time I've wanted to do this is for code golf, and then I've just copied my code out of the file and pasted it into an echo -n 'content'>file statement.

Answer 4

Yet another perl WTDI:

perl -i -p0777we's/\n\z//' filename

Answer 5

head -n -1 abc > newfile
tail -n 1 abc | tr -d '\n' >> newfile

Edit 2:

Here is an awk version (corrected) that doesn't accumulate a potentially huge array:

awk '{if (line) print line; line=$0} END {printf $0}' abc

Answer 6

POSIX SED:

'${/^$/d}'

$ - match last line


{ COMMANDS } - A group of commands may be enclosed between { and } characters. This is particularly useful when you want a group of commands to be triggered by a single address (or address-range) match.