How do I find files that do not end with a newline/linefeed?

Question

How can I list normal text (.txt) filenames, that don\'t end with a newline?

e.g.: list (output) this filename:

$ cat a.txt
asdfasdlsad4rand         


        

Answer 1

This should do the trick:

#!/bin/bash

for file in `find $1 -type f -name "*.txt"`;
do
        nlines=`tail -n 1 $file | grep '^$' | wc -l`
        if [ $nlines -eq 1 ]
                then echo $file
        fi
done;

Call it this way: ./script dir

E.g. ./script /home/user/Documents/ -> lists all text files in /home/user/Documents ending with \n.

Answer 2

Most solutions on this page do not work for me (FreeBSD 10.3 amd64). Ian Will's OSX solution does almost-always work, but is pretty difficult to follow : - (

There is an easy solution that almost-always works too : (if $f is the file) :

sed -i '' -e '$a\' "$f"

There is a major problem with the sed solution : it never gives you the opportunity to just check (and not append a newline).

Both the above solutions fail for DOS files. I think the most portable/scriptable solution is probably the easiest one, which I developed myself : - )

Here is that elementary sh script which combines file/unix2dos/tail. In production, you will likely need to use "$f" in quotes and fetch tail output (embedded into the shell variable named last) as \"$f\"

if file $f | grep 'ASCII text' > /dev/null; then
    if file $f | grep 'CRLF' > /dev/null; then
        type unix2dos > /dev/null || exit 1
        dos2unix $f
        last="`tail -c1 $f`"
        [ -n "$last" ] && echo >> $f
        unix2dos $f
    else
        last="`tail -c1 $f`"
        [ -n "$last" ] && echo >> $f
    fi
fi

Hope this helps someone.

Answer 3

This is kludgy; someone surely can do better:

for f in `find . -name '*.txt' -type f`; do
    if test `tail -c 1 "$f" | od -c | head -n 1 | tail -c 3` != \\n; then
        echo $f;
    fi
done

N.B. this answers the question in the title, which is different from the question in the body (which is looking for files that end with \n\n I think).

Answer 4

This example works for me on OSX (many of the above solutions did not)

for file in `find . -name "*.java"`
do
  result=`od -An -tc -j $(( $(ls -l $file  | awk '{print $5}') - 1 )) $file`
  last_char=`echo $result | sed 's/ *//'`
  if [ "$last_char" != "\n" ]
  then
    #echo "Last char is .$last_char."
    echo $file
  fi
done

Answer 5

The best oneliner I could come up with is this:

git grep --cached -Il '' | xargs -L1 bash -c 'if test "$(tail -c 1 "$0")"; then echo "No new line at end of $0"; exit 1; fi'

This uses git grep, because in my use-case I want to ensure files commited to a git branch have ending newlines.

If this is required outside of a git repo, you can of course just use grep instead.

grep -RIl '' . | xargs -L1 bash -c 'if test "$(tail -c 1 "$0")"; then echo "No new line at end of $0"; exit 1; fi'

Why I use grep? Because you can easily filter out binary files with -I.

Then the usual xargs/tail thingy found in other answers, with the addition to exit with 1 if a file has no newline. So this can be used in a pre-commit githook or CI.

Answer 6

Another option:

$ find . -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0I {} bash -c '[ -z "$(tail -n 1 {})" ] && echo {}'