cmd.exe, append text on new line

Question

I am trying to script appending a line to a file on multiple windows machines. the command echo text >> file.txt does not put the word text on a newline, but on the last line. I cannot seem to get \n or \r to work with echo on windows. help!

Answer 1

I assume the last line in file.txt is not terminated by a line-break, so you can explicitly append such:

rem // Append line-break plus text:
(echo/&echo text) >> file.txt

If file.txt may or may not be terminated by a line-break, you could use find :

rem // Use `find` to force a final line-break, then append text and write to temporary file:
(find /V "" < file.txt & echo text) > file.txt.tmp
rem // Move temporary file onto original one:
move /Y file.txt.tmp file.txt

Note that find limits line lengths to 4095 characters or bytes.