"cat" command no output using Catalina, and "sort" not sorting.

OK, so I googled how to do this and found the command:

file -I Jumbled.txt

which yields this info:

Jumbled.txt: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

So, how is this useful?

Thanks for the reply. OK, I've installed BBEdit, but can't find how to use it to check the encoding used in my text file.

I looked at "View/get info", found nothing of interest, and looked at all the menus. no way to check encoding that I can see.

help offers to "Reopen using encoding..." but I don't want to change it until I know what I've got to start with.

???

Etresoft: OK, so taking the initiative here, I cut and pasted my unsorted list into a new file using the Mac "TextEdit" program.

When saving, you can select the encoding type. I let it use the default UTF-8 encoding. the file shows up as charset=us-ascii when I check it using the "file -I" command.

Still have the same problems: "cat" won't display it, and "sort" won't sort it.

Well, lucky for me, Notepad revealed the lack of line feeds, which told me what I had to do. BBEdit may be able to show that it was us-ascii, but that didn’t tell me the solution. FYI: When BBEdit opened the file it looked like it had line feeds. And I never did figure out how to get BBEdit to reveal the encoding. But I’m done, problem solved. I have good notes for the future.

Thanks again

vic

Correction, actually, when I "cat" the new us-ascii text file I get the following output: "***@gmail.com"

[Email Edited by Moderator]

All things considered, you got me away from blaming the MacOS, and looking at the file I’m trying to manipulate. So your suggestion was helpful. Thanks

Thanks!

I never knew there was a difference between CR, LF, CRLF…

you learn something every day,

(unless you’re careful…)

Vic

etresoft:

OK, so I fired up Parallels and copied the text file to Windows, went to a command prompt and issued the command:

"type scrambled.txt"

and guess what? It STILL only displayed the last line of the file.

So, THAT's good news that my MacOS isn't messed up. So what's the problem?

Next I opened the file with Window's Notepad, and GUESS WHAT?!

THERE WERE NO LINEBREAKS!!

Why didn't that show up in Mac's TextEdit program? Each Email address had it's own line, so I had no way of knowing there weren't line breaks (CR's) already in the text.

So I used Notepad to manually add a linefeed after each address, and the "Type" command in the command shell worked as expected.

So I moved the file back to the Mac directory and using the Terminal window the "cat" command worked as expected.

So, then I did a "sort scrambled.txt >sorted.txt" and it all sorted fine.

Have you ever seen this behavior before?

Thanks for your help.

Vic