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

Here is a nice, tidy Python solution. I made no attempt to be terse here.

This modifies the file in-place, rather than making a copy of the file and stripping the newline from the last line of the copy. If the file is large, this will be much faster than the Perl solution that was chosen as the best answer.

It truncates a file by two bytes if the last two bytes are CR/LF, or by one byte if the last byte is LF. It does not attempt to modify the file if the last byte(s) are not (CR)LF. It handles errors. Tested in Python 2.6.

Put this in a file called "striplast" and chmod +x striplast.

#!/usr/bin/python

# strip newline from last line of a file


import sys

def trunc(filename, new_len):
    try:
        # open with mode "append" so we have permission to modify
        # cannot open with mode "write" because that clobbers the file!
        f = open(filename, "ab")
        f.truncate(new_len)
        f.close()
    except IOError:
        print "cannot write to file:", filename
        sys.exit(2)

# get input argument
if len(sys.argv) == 2:
    filename = sys.argv[1]
else:
    filename = "--help"  # wrong number of arguments so print help

if filename == "--help" or filename == "-h" or filename == "/?":
    print "Usage: %s <filename>" % sys.argv[0]
    print "Strips a newline off the last line of a file."
    sys.exit(1)


try:
    # must have mode "b" (binary) to allow f.seek() with negative offset
    f = open(filename, "rb")
except IOError:
    print "file does not exist:", filename
    sys.exit(2)


SEEK_EOF = 2
f.seek(-2, SEEK_EOF)  # seek to two bytes before end of file

end_pos = f.tell()

line = f.read()
f.close()

if line.endswith("\r\n"):
    trunc(filename, end_pos)
elif line.endswith("\n"):
    trunc(filename, end_pos + 1)

P.S. In the spirit of "Perl golf", here's my shortest Python solution. It slurps the whole file from standard input into memory, strips all newlines off the end, and writes the result to standard output. Not as terse as the Perl; you just can't beat Perl for little tricky fast stuff like this.

Remove the "\n" from the call to .rstrip() and it will strip all white space from the end of the file, including multiple blank lines.

Put this into "slurp_and_chomp.py" and then run python slurp_and_chomp.py < inputfile > outputfile.

import sys

sys.stdout.write(sys.stdin.read().rstrip("\n"))

Answer 2

sed -n "1 x;1 !H
$ {x;s/\n*$//p;}
" YourFile

Should remove any last occurence of \n in file. Not working on huge file (due to sed buffer limitation)

Answer 3

perl -pi -e 's/\n$// if(eof)' your_file

Answer 4

I had a similar problem, but was working with a windows file and need to keep those CRLF -- my solution on linux:

sed 's/\r//g' orig | awk '{if (NR>1) printf("\r\n"); printf("%s",$0)}' > tweaked

Answer 5

perl -pe 'chomp if eof' filename >filename2

or, to edit the file in place:

perl -pi -e 'chomp if eof' filename

^{[Editor's note: -pi -e was originally -pie, but, as noted by several commenters and explained by @hvd, the latter doesn't work.]}

This was described as a 'perl blasphemy' on the awk website I saw.

But, in a test, it worked.

Answer 6

If you want to do it right, you need something like this:

use autodie qw(open sysseek sysread truncate);

my $file = shift;
open my $fh, '+>>', $file;
my $pos = tell $fh;
sysseek $fh, $pos - 1, 0;
sysread $fh, my $buf, 1 or die 'No data to read?';

if($buf eq "\n"){
    truncate $fh, $pos - 1;
}

We open the file for reading and appending; opening for appending means that we are already seeked to the end of the file. We then get the numerical position of the end of the file with tell. We use that number to seek back one character, and then we read that one character. If it's a newline, we truncate the file to the character before that newline, otherwise, we do nothing.

This runs in constant time and constant space for any input, and doesn't require any more disk space, either.