How do I print all complete lines of a file? By 'complete' I mean only the ones that end with newline character. grep treats EOF as line delimiter, so grep '^.*$' file will print the last line even if there's no newline at the end of file.
The whole problem comes from parsing log files: we need to somehow be sure that the last entry was completely logged - i.e. it ends with newline.
A simple approach is to use perl:
perl -ne '/\n/ && print' file
If you just want to check that the last character of a file is a newline, you can do:
tail -c1 file | grep -q '^$' && echo yes || echo no
But the -c option is not POSIX, so it isn't portable.
read (at least in Bourne shell) requires a line to be terminated with newline:
# /bin/sh -c 'echo -e "foo\nbar\c" | while read line; do echo $line; done'
foo
#
So you could use something like:
#!/bin/sh
while read line
do echo $line
done < logfile.txt
