I have a tab separated text file e.g. test.txt containing ^M characters and a missing newline symbol at the end:
Samples Factor
1 2
Using tr and thread https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/31947/how-to-add-a-newline-to-the-end-of-a-file , I am able to process this table.
My problem is that in my script the line
tr '\r' '\n' < test.txt | sed -e '$a\' > test_temp
mv test_temp test.txt
makes everything below appear in "red" in vim, and my immediately following code does not run. If I remove the sed -e '$a\' part, everything works.
Do you have an explanation for this? Thanks for your help.
Vim seems to be incorrectly treating the backslash as special, even though backslashes don't do anything inside single quotes. What does :set syntax show? My Vim colors everything correctly with syntax=sh, so perhaps yours isn't treating your file as a shell script. (Interestingly, you may notice that Stack Overflow's syntax highlighter gets it wrong, too.)
If that's it, try adding a shebang line like #!/bin/bash up top.
Whatever it is, a simpler way to add a new line at the end is to simply echo one. It gets rid of the inefficiency of sed scanning through the entire input stream to find EOF.
{ tr '\r' '\n' < test.txt; echo; } > test_tmp