in order to remove new lines from cmdbuf. Coverity thinks there's
a danger of strlen(cmdbuf) being 0, and thus the strlen being negative.
That shouldn't happen, but if fgets hits EOF midway through a line, we
might get a string that doesn't have a trailing '\n', and end up
removing the wrong character. Tidy this up by checking that the string
isn't 0 length, and that the character we're zapping is a newline.