Does input redirection (<) append a newline character?

Question

I was originally of the impression that

$ ./myprog
moo[CTRL-D]

is exactly the same as

$ echo moo > cow
$ ./myprog < cow

But I found that myprog always counts one more \n in the second version than in the first. Why is this?

Turns out wc does the same thing...

$ wc -l
moo[CTRL-D]0

(Apparently zero lines is possible?)

$ echo moo > cow
$ wc -l < cow
1

Can anyone explain this to me?

Answer 1

echo appends a newline, unless you tell it not to, by putting -n first or \c at the end, or putting -e first and \c at the end or... you really don't want to know all the varieties of echo. Use printf moo > cow and you'll have a file with zero lines.