Re: ed: please give me a little control over appending final newlines

[Andrew L. Moore]

In message <address@hidden>, Andreas Schwab writes:
>|>     if [ ."$@" = . ]; then ed "$TMP"; else ed "$@" "$TMP"; fi
>             ^^^^
>
>This will expand to more than one word if $# > 1, probably giving a
>syntax error from test.  The test is not nessary at all, just use the
>else branch unconditionally.

In the particular case of ed(1), "" is interpreted as an illegal file name.
The following evidently works:

if [ ."$*" = . ]; then ed "$TMP"; else ed "$@" "$TMP"; fi