bug#19240: cut 8.22 adds newline

[Paul Eggert]

On 12/01/2014 02:06 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> If we were just implementing now, I'd not output the extra '\n',

I have just the opposite kneejerk reaction; typically text-based apps 
are simpler and easier to document and use when they silently pretend 
that the input had a trailing newline.  That's what 'awk' and 'grep' do, 
for example, and they works fine.  There are some solid counterexamples 
(e.g., Emacs, diff) but they have good reasons to be counterexamples.

> a newline should only be added where needed,
> especially with a low level tool like sed.

I'm afraid 'sed' is not that low-level, and GNU sed's current behavior 
is inconsistent.  Sometimes it silently appends a trailing newline to 
the input before processing it, and sometimes it doesn't:

$ printf x | sed '$a\
> y'
x
y
$ printf x | sed 's/$/y/'
xy$

> changing at this stage needs to be carefully considered

Yes, the use cases are key here.