Why should text files end with a newline?

Question

I assume everyone here is familiar with the adage that all text files should end with a newline. I\'ve known of this \"rule\" for years but I\'ve always wondered — why?

Answer 1

It may be related to the difference between:

• text file (each line is supposed to end in an end-of-line)
• binary file (there are no true "lines" to speak of, and the length of the file must be preserved)

If each line does end in an end-of-line, this avoids, for instance, that concatenating two text files would make the last line of the first run into the first line of the second.

Plus, an editor can check at load whether the file ends in an end-of-line, saves it in its local option 'eol', and uses that when writing the file.

A few years back (2005), many editors (ZDE, Eclipse, Scite, ...) did "forget" that final EOL, which was not very appreciated.
Not only that, but they interpreted that final EOL incorrectly, as 'start a new line', and actually start to display another line as if it already existed.
This was very visible with a 'proper' text file with a well-behaved text editor like vim, compared to opening it in one of the above editors. It displayed an extra line below the real last line of the file. You see something like this:

1 first line
2 middle line
3 last line
4