The focus of this question shifted a bit, the real problem is addressed in Edit 2 below. The problem at the start:
I want to append a simple string, for example the letter N, to all lines in my file. This must happen without introducing linebreaks. What I need looks like this:
file result
Aa AaN
Bb BbN
C CN
Dd DdN
The only thing I found so far is
sed -e 's/../&N/'
which appends the string only at a certain location, so for entries with varying character length this does not work as the result looks like this:
AaN
BbN
C
N
DdN
The most simple analogon is
sed -e 's/^/&N/' file
which prepends each line. So I need the reverse parameter of ^ that allows me to append to each line, no matter how long the string is in that line. The other questions I found about appending introduce several other constraints that don't apply here.
Edit: The suggested
sed 's/$/N/' file > file2
only changes the very last line in my file., whereas I need the change in every line. It seems to work in the linked question but here it does not. I don't know why.
Edit 2:
As RavinderSingh13 pointed out, my list that I obtained by some other commands contained ^M characters. So by using
cat -v file
the real content was revealed:
Aa^M
Bb^M
C^M
Dd^M
The presented solution was able to fix this issue!
If you are ok with awk, you could simply use print instead of substitution too.
awk '{gsub(/\r/,"");print $0"N"}' Input_file
In case you want to do for a specific field vice then try:(taking example where 1st field should be append with N here):
awk '{gsub(/\r/,"");$1=$1"N"} 1' Input_file