I'm parsing a temp file whose lines would like removed so I run: tr '\n' ' ' < temp > temp2. Now when I wc -l temp2 it is returning 0 lines instead of 1 which was unexpected for me.
After checking the manual, wc -l counts just the newlines and not the lines. Its behaviour is fine but might be problematic if you don't know if the last line of a file contains a line feed.
Is there any tool or workaround that count lines even if they have no linefeed?
awk to the rescue!
awk 'END{print NR}' file
will work fine without the trailing newline.