I was writing some tests for Asfaload and I needed to validate that a JSON file is generated correctly. I needed the file to be a one-line file, with no End Of Line character (I probably could have done it an other way, working with a file having an EOL, but let’s not consider this for the sake of this blog post).

On a unix platform, when you save a file with vim, it will add a EOL character if there is none. On Unix, it appears eol is a line terminator, and so the convention is to have the line end with eol. Finding the way to remove that last eol is surprisingly harder to find than I thought, hence this post. The way to remove the `eol`` of the last line with vim is this:

1. :set bin or start vim with vim -b: switch to binary mode
2. :set noeol: from the vim help: When writing a file and this option is off and the 'binary' option is on, or 'fixeol' option is off, no <EOL> will be written for the last line in the file.

Easy to do in the end.