Re: VIM shows line ending when there is no line ending on the last line of a file

This is expected. Your complaint seems to stem from a confusion
between "line separators" (the DOS and Windows concept) and "line
endings" (the Unix and Vim concept). Let us explain how Vim does it:

Vim doesn't store the individual lines differently based on whether
they had an end-of-line in the input. IIUC (but I might be wrong),
each line is stored internally as a C string, ended by neither a CR
nor a LF (nor both) but a null byte. This is why Vim must replace
actual nulls in the file, usually by linefeeds, in order to avoid
terminating those C strings early (see ":help NL-used-for-NUL"). Of
course the last one of those C strings must be properly terminated
too.

When writing the file, Vim takes care of any translation required by a
possible discrepancy between 'encoding' and 'fileencoding', and at the
same time it writes the final end-of-line, or not, depending on the
saved values of the following settings:
• If 'binary' is off and 'fixeol' is on (the default) a final
end-of-line is always written. (Older versions of Vim, where 'fixeol'
is not defined, behave as if it were on. This option is a fairly
recent invention, see the patch descriptions at
http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/patches/7.4/ for details.)
• If 'binary' is on, the local value of 'endofline' determines whether
or not a final end-of-line will be written. It was set or cleared when
reading, by the (present or missing, respectively) end-of-line marker
at the end of the last line.
• If 'binary' and 'fixeol' are both off, the file will have a final
end-of-line if and only if it had one when reading. From reading the
help I'm not sure if the value used is the local 'endofline' setting
or some internal variable not accessible to vimscript.

The 'list' mechanism is simpler: when 'list' is on, the 'listchars'
value of "eol:" (if set: by default a dollar sign) is displayed in the
screen cell immediately following the last character of every line.
This is meant to show where the line ends, and I find it useful to
check for end-of-line spaces, even in the last line, and that without
cluttering the whole text (even where not at end-of-line) with
disturbing (to me) "space:" placeholders. (When 'list' is on, hard
tabs are always visible unless "tab:" is explicitly set to two spaces;
if it is not set, tabs display as ^I). 'list' and 'listchars' take no
notice of whether there was a final end-of-line in tyhe disk
representation of the input file; they just display an "end-of-line
marker" ($ or whatever you choose) "at the end of the line" (sic),
i.e. (if I'm not mistaken) where they find the terminating null for
the line in question.


Best regards,
Tony.

On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 9:35 PM, <alessio.pollero@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, today I discovered a strange issue that lead me to waste 2 hours of time, since I rely on vim but it seems I discovered a bug.
>
> When working with files I usually put on end of line markers with the command : set list .
> Today I had a file with the last line without a LF character but though I had enabled the line ending markers(with : set list) and put vim in binary mode, it kept sowing a dollar sign at the end of the last line, as if a line mark was there for real. Why vim shows an end of line when there is actually no end of line ?
>
> Even opening with -b option I get the same result...
>
> To simulate just try with a simple perl script to write a single character on a file:
>
>
> open(FH, '>', 'file.txt');
> print FH 'a';
> close(FH);
>
> you will notice that VIM will keep showing the end of line sign.
>
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