No newline at end of file

Question

When doing a git diff it says \"No newline at end of file\".

Ok, there is no newline at end of file. What\'s the big deal?

What\'s the

Answer 1

It's not just bad style, it can lead to unexpected behavior when using other tools on the file.

Here is test.txt:

first line
second line

There is no newline character on the last line. Let's see how many lines are in the file:

$ wc -l test.txt
1 test.txt

Maybe that's what you want, but in most cases you'd probably expect there to be 2 lines in the file.

Also, if you wanted to combine files it may not behave the way you'd expect:

$ cat test.txt test.txt
first line
second linefirst line
second line

Finally, it would make your diffs slightly more noisy if you were to add a new line. If you added a third line, it would show an edit to the second line as well as the new addition.