on 2/24/03 3:07 PM, Chris Berry <comp...@hotmail.com> wrote:

This missing final newline problem is one of the oldest and most commonly recurring UNIX "bugs" as I see it. It seems to me that it is a good thing for any code that writes a text file line by line to provide the final newline if it is missing. You can always argue about whose responsibility this is, but it is so easy to do IF your code is already writing out the file, that I think there is little excuse for not doing it, especially given how open the possible inter-operability scenario is, regardless of rfcs.

However, if some other program has already written out a file, that is entirely another thing--to open that file and add a missing newline. Here (if I havent misinterpreted) it sounds like that is the case - some other agent already put the file in the maildir. If the file was simply moved there intact then there was no opportunity to alter it. But whatever agent wrote the file out originally (in the maildir or not) should have included the final newline.

That would be the place to start I think - to bring up the issue to whoever is responsible for the agent that wrote the file out line-by-line. Any agent that is interacting with a network port is probably copying data on a line-by-line basis and has the opportunity to add any missing final newline easily. Likewise for any agent that is processing header lines, scanning for, or possibly adding header information along the way.