Hi Peng,
On Sun, 5 Sep 2021, Peng Yu wrote:
I got 1 instead of 2 in the following example. How to count the last
even when it does not end with a newline character? Thanks.
$ printf 'a\nb'|wc -l
1
Here is a little trick.
You can append a newline if/when missing to the end of input with:
sed '$a\'
So for your example:
$ printf 'a\nb' | sed '$a\' | wc -l
2
$ printf 'a\nb\n' | sed '$a\' | wc -l
2
You can apply this to a bunch of files at once also, with potentially
missing newlines in their final lines:
$ sed '$a\' *.txt
Note this is not the same as
$ cat *.txt | sed '$a\'
which will only add a missing newline once to the end of the entire input.
Hope that helps,
Carl
