So I'm trying to add a "!" to the end of every word in my placesCapEx file from my placesCap file
This is what it looks like:
Yugoslavian
Zambia
Zambian
Zomba
This is what I want it to look like:
Yugoslavian!
Zambia!
Zambian!
Zomba!
I've tried sed 's/$/\!/' Wordlists/placesCap > Wordlists/placesCapEx and just sed 's/$/!/' Wordlists/placesCap > Wordlists/placesCapEx
What happens is when I run this and then cat Wordlists/placesCapEx it outputs
!ugoslavian
!ambia
!ambian
!omba
I've done some research and someone stated something about it being a Unix thing but they never went into detail
Your simpler sed command should work fine for a text file where end-of-line is a single newline character. You likely have "dos" format files here (carriage return / linefeed).
Consider:
$ cat zippy
Zippy
$ od -c zippy
0000000 Z i p p y \r \n
0000007
$ sed 's/$/!/' zippy
!ippy
$ sed 's/$/!/' zippy | od -c
0000000 Z i p p y \r ! \n
0000010
You're seeing the effect of \r displayed on a terminal: move the cursor to start of line, print the '!', newline goes to next line.
To handle the presence of \r\n pairs as your end-of-line character, you might try:
$ sed 's/\r*$/!/' zippy
Zippy!
...assuming your sed honors the \r as mine (GNU sed 4.2.2) does.