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From: Mark Bourne <nntp.mbourne@spamgourmet.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Buffer contents well-defined after fgets() reaches EOF ?
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:57:29 +0000
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Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> On 09.02.2025 11:50, Michael S wrote:
>> What do you consider "last line" of the file in which last character is
>> not LF?
> 
> I consider missing newlines at the end of any text line as a bug.
> (And I'm not inclined to use a weaker word than "bug".) YMMV.

I think I once saw somewhere that utilities originating on Unix 
typically consider \n to be a line terminator, so include it at the end 
of every line including the last, whereas those originating on 
DOS/Windows typically consider \n to be a line separator, so don't 
include it at the end of the last line.  So Unix-originated utilities 
might not behave as expected if the file doesn't end with \n, whereas 
Windows-originated utilities might treat the file as having an extra 
blank line at the end of the file if it does end with \n.  Utilities 
ported from one system to the other sometimes continue following the 
convention of their origin, rather than the system they're running on.

I'm not sure where I originally saw that, but for what it's worth the 
following Stack Overflow makes a similar claim: 
<https://stackoverflow.com/a/729795>.  Most of the answer discusses 
POSIX, with a "line" defined as ending with a terminating newline, hence 
every line including the last ends with a newline, while a final 
footnote notes that doesn't necessarily apply to non-POSIX systems, 
particularly Windows.

-- 
Mark.