"No new line at end of file"

Misel · 12-05-2003, 11:11 AM

I see that quite often and yes, I understand the message. But I created this thread to ask where it came from. Why does gcc prints out that warning.

To me it doesn't really serve a purpose - especially since I haven't seen any errors due to a missing new line so far.

Any ideas?

jim mcnamara · 12-05-2003, 11:21 AM

Unix utilities often read in the entrie file, then process it, eg., sort, gcc.

The old presumption was that the file was truncated or corrupted- this used to happen a lot when disks went bad on a monthly basis 25 years ago. The EOF marker for a text file is ASCII 26. So if one bit of a real byte got twiddled, an EOF could appear where it was not supposed to be.

That's the origin of the warning.

Misel · 12-05-2003, 12:55 PM

thank you