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's very late here but I just faced one bug in file processing and that came because the files were not ending with empty newline. We were processing text files with sed and sed was omitting the last line from output which was causing invalid json structure and sending rest of the process to fail state.

All we were doing was:

There is one sample file say: foo.txt with some json content inside it.

[{
    someProp: value
},
{
    someProp: value
}] <-- No newline here

The file was created in widows machine and window scripts were processing that file using PowerShell commands. All good.

When we processed same file using sed command sed 's|value|newValue|g' foo.txt > foo.txt.tmp

The newly generated file was

[{
    someProp: value
},
{
    someProp: value

and boom, it failed the rest of the processes because of the invalid JSON.

So it's always a good practice to end your file with empty new line.