It has long been unix convention that every line of text is followed by a terminating character. It used to be that many command-line tools relied on this, I su

It has long been unix convention that every line of text is followed by a terminating character. It used to be that many command-line tools relied on this, I suspect most tools are more forgiving nowadays. Nearly all linux/unix text editors perform little normalizations to be as compatible as possible. I bet if you opened a file in vim's binary editing mode (vim -b) you could write it without the final line ending (does nano also have a binary mode? might be worth trying). Edit: Apparently nano has a -L option that skips the last-line normalization.