I’ve had the unfortunate experience today of finding a lot of config files full of completely unnecessary trailing newlines. One newline at the end is perhaps acceptable, but any more than one is an absolute no-no. Not only do some applications whine about them (just like some do if you don’t incline the trailing newline) but they waste valuable terminal space when trying to read through a file.

I think I know who the culprit is - a colleague who is particularly fond of the enter key and who I happen to know configured this particular server. Needless to say, all surplus carriage returns have now been removed and I’ve moved slightly further forward with the Puppetisation of these particular config files. At least when Puppet keeps removing all the line breaks people eventually get the message…

Don’t even get me started on the extraneous “\n”s in his Puppet manifests.