Re: Trailing newlines disappear

[Greg Wooledge]

On Fri, Jun 09, 2017 at 08:58:05PM +0300, Pierre Gaston wrote:
> Even if they don't realize it, few people would expect:
> 
> var=$(wc -l file);echo "$var"
> 
> to print 2 lines.

imadev:~$ file=$'a\nb\nc\nd\ne'; touch "$file"
imadev:~$ var=$(wc -l "$file"); echo "$var"
0 a
b
c
d
e

> Trailing newlines are often not that interesting.

But embedded newlines certainly are!


(Really, though, I know what you meant.  Command substitution strips
trailing newlines because that's how it has always worked, and because
95% of the time, that's what you want.)