How can I delete a newline if it is the last character in a file?

Posted by Todd Partridge on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Todd Partridge
Published on 2009-10-31T10:42:19Z Indexed on 2010/03/20 7:51 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 248

Filed under:

linux

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sed

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awk

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perl

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?

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