I have created an empty file in linux and added a character to it. But it is showing up as a 2 bytes file

It seems it is appending a (char)10 to the end of the file. Note that I am doing this in Nautilus, not programmatica开发者_开发技巧lly. Why does this happen? How to prevent it?

ASCII 0x0A is the newline '\n'.

If that file of yours has been created with echo 1 >file there's a newline added to it. If you're looking to skip that behavior, do echo -n 1 >file.

The ASCII character with the decimal code 10 (0x0a in hex) is '\n' i.e. the new line (LF - Line Feed) character in Unix-like systems. How did you create the file?

EDIT:

If you use echo, you should probably try the -n flag which suppresses the final newline that is emitted by default:

echo -n X > file