OT: scripting, removing trailing ^L

[Fairlight]

Simon--er, no...it was William James McEachran--said:
> Slightly off-topic.
> The data comes from filePro, some of it passes thru 'gnuplot', and in
> the end the gnuplot graph is incorporated into the filepro output form.
> The whole thing then is converted with 'pcl6'/ghostpcl into a PDF file
> Result, a PDF file with data & a graph.
> 
> gnuplot adds an unneed "^L" to the end of the graph pcl file. I've got
> to come up with a way to remove just this one character at the end of the
> file.  I've got a mental block on removing just the final character.
> 
> sed? awk?

#!/usr/bin/perl

binmode(STDIN);
my (@lines);
@lines = <STDIN>;
$lines[scalar(@lines)-1] =~ s/\014(\r?\n?)$/$1/;
print(@lines);
exit;
#####  END OF PROGRAM

This removes -only- the -last- FF present on the last 'line' of output, and
preserves any CRLF or LF at the end of that line.  This will work fine on a
binary file, and nothing else is touched.  Works on 'doze or *nix.

It's meant to be run in a pipeline as written:

     original_generator | gnuplot | this_filterff | whatever_else

If you wanted it to work on a file from the filesystem or store to a
specific place, it's a trivial change to make.  Just ask and specify
exactly what you need.

Merry Christmas!

mark->