insert a text file into a variable in order to insert into a bytea column

Hello,
I have a file called file.txt that is 53604 bytes. When I do the following

\set stext `cat file.txt`

select length(:'stext'); length
--------
53603

it seems that one byte (the last newline character) is chomped off. How can I import a text file into a variable and insert it into a bytea column without losing the last newline byte.

What I want to do is something like this:

\set stext `cat file.txt`
insert into stored_files (file_name,file_text) values ('file',:'stext');

without losing a character within the variable stext.

In table stored_files, file_name is text and file_text is bytea.

I'm using psql 9.3.10 on Ubuntu 14 Linux (32 bit.)
I cannot use pg_read_file because that is for the server side, and I'm on the client side.

There should be an easy way to get a text file into a database column.

Thank you,
Arthur Lewis