🚀 go-pugleaf

pjh@mccc.edu (P. J. Holsberg) writes:
>I wonder why ....
>
>	I cannot create a 1 byte file with
>		vi
>		cat
>		microemacs
>
>But all of these stick a newline character in without being asked!

Not so for cat: try

    $ cat > one-byte
    a^D^D

(i.e. press ctrl-d (or whatever you have EOF set to) twice).

The reason for vi behaving in this way (which I agree should be
optional, as it is in Hemlock for example) is that most UNIX utilities
use linefeed as a line terminator.

Apparently VAX/VMS treats lf (or is it crlf?) as a line separator; if
the last character in a file is lf you get a final blank line.

The obvious conclusion is that UNIX is written in C, and VMS is written
in Pascal :-).

Tim.