GNU bug report logs - #19240
cut 8.22 adds newline

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From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigBrady.com>,  Eric Blake <eblake <at> redhat.com>, John Kendall <john <at> capps.com>, 19240 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#19240: cut 8.22 adds newline
Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 14:24:55 -0800

On 12/01/2014 02:06 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> If we were just implementing now, I'd not output the extra '\n',

I have just the opposite kneejerk reaction; typically text-based apps 
are simpler and easier to document and use when they silently pretend 
that the input had a trailing newline.  That's what 'awk' and 'grep' do, 
for example, and they works fine.  There are some solid counterexamples 
(e.g., Emacs, diff) but they have good reasons to be counterexamples.

> a newline should only be added where needed,
> especially with a low level tool like sed.

I'm afraid 'sed' is not that low-level, and GNU sed's current behavior 
is inconsistent.  Sometimes it silently appends a trailing newline to 
the input before processing it, and sometimes it doesn't:

$ printf x | sed '$a\
> y'
x
y
$ printf x | sed 's/$/y/'
xy$

> changing at this stage needs to be carefully considered

Yes, the use cases are key here.

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