I have a Mercurial repository for Blogger templates, I download all templates with a Python script, then I edit them when I need to make a change.

I see this message every time after I save the files, it's actually from diff not Hg nor Git:

diff -r 27343c68b285 3803541356848955053-blog.xml
--- a/3803541356848955053-blog.xml      Thu Nov 15 18:34:08 2012 +0800
+++ b/3803541356848955053-blog.xml      Fri Nov 16 18:53:12 2012 +0800
@@ -1011,4 +1011,4 @@
     </footer>
     <b:include data='blog' name='google-analytics'/>
   </body>
-</html>
\\ No newline at end of file
+</html>

It's not actually a big deal, but quite annoying, because always has an unnecessary line of change. Vim will add an end-of-line (EOL) at the end of file. The last byte of downloaded XML file is > not \n (0x0A).

$ hexdump -C "$FILE" | tail -2
0000a770  62 6f 64 79 3e 0a 3c 2f  68 74 6d 6c 3e           |body>.</html>|
0000a77d
$ vim "$FILE" # do save
$ hexdump -C "$FILE" | tail -2
0000a770  62 6f 64 79 3e 0a 3c 2f  68 74 6d 6c 3e 0a        |body>.</html>.|
0000a77e

The file size is increased by 1 byte, that is the EOL character.

Keep untouched

If I want to keep the source untouched where I do not change, an easy way to save is:

:set binary noeol
:w

binary is needed in order to get noeol to work, see :help eol.

Or I can write a script to do:

head -c -1 "$FILE" > "$FILE.tmp" && mv "$FILE"{.tmp,}

This will remove the last byte, but it does not check if last byte is \n.

Fix it

From what I read on Internet, having EOL at the end of file seems like a correct way. So, I changed my download shell script to add an EOL to files:

#!/bin/bash 
# 2008-10-25T20:16:46+0800
 
python ~/p/yjl/Blogger/BackupTemplate.py

for tmpl in *-20??????-??????.xml; do
  echo >> $tmpl
  mv $tmpl ${tmpl%-20??????-??????.xml}.xml
done

I use the script to remove the date part from filename of downloaded XML, don't need those since I use version control.