Tom Emerson
"newline" is Unix's fancy way of saying "enter" [carraige return] -- it is actually pretty tough to NOT have a final "newline" in a file because most people's tendancy is to press <enter> after adding stuff to a file, even if only one line.
If you used something like "vi", however I can see how this could happen -- you run the cursor to the end of the file, press the letter "A" for "append (at the end of the line since this is an upper case 'a')", pressed "<enter>" to get to the start of the new line, type in the stuff you want to add, then BEFORE actually pressing <enter> again, you press <esc> to get out of insert/append mode, then colon (:) to get a command line, and "wq" to write-and-quit.
vi (and its clones) is a text editor which preserves backward compatibility with the traditional Unix text files and therefore it automatically adds the newline ('\n') character at the end of the text file. It doesn't matter whether the user presses <Enter> or not. Other text editors often don't add newline automatically. It was a must in the past because many text oriented utilities (sed, ...) didn't process the last line if newline was missing. GNU text utilities don't have this limitation. Anyway, I suggest that people check what they write about. This is my second e-mail today which corrects a wrong statement and I've noticed there are more misleading emails in this list. -- Alexandr.Malusek@imv.liu.se