Dear All,

I have a pipeline that generates output like

file1
file2

(basically a list of files separated by newlines - od -c confirms \n
characters).

I want to join them on one line using sed (I know it can be done in a
number of other ways, just want to do it with sed).

I tried sed -e 's/^J//g' but sed came up with the message sed command
garbled (^J is Ctrl-V Ctrl-J to literally insert a newline).

How can I add the newline in the search pattern so that the sed
command will work (SunOS 5.9)?

Regards,
George

cityuk <gklekeas@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> I have a pipeline that generates output like
> 
> file1
> file2
> 
> (basically a list of files separated by newlines - od -c confirms \n
> characters).
> 
> I want to join them on one line using sed (I know it can be done in a
> number of other ways, just want to do it with sed).
> 
> I tried sed -e 's/^J//g' but sed came up with the message sed command
> garbled (^J is Ctrl-V Ctrl-J to literally insert a newline).
> 
> How can I add the newline in the search pattern so that the sed
> command will work (SunOS 5.9)?
> 
> Regards,
> George

I can't fully explain how this work, but I tested it under bsd and solaris:

  sed -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n//;ta' 



bash-3.00# uname -r
5.10
bash-3.00# cat >> sedtest
line1
line2
line3
line4
bash-3.00# sed -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n//;ta' sedtest
line1line2line3line4

In article <jl0qqj$gla$1@reader1.panix.com>,
Cydrome Leader  <presence@MUNGEpanix.com> wrote:
>cityuk <gklekeas@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear All,
>> 
>> I have a pipeline that generates output like
>> 
>> file1
>> file2
>> 
>> (basically a list of files separated by newlines - od -c confirms \n
>> characters).
>> 
>> I want to join them on one line using sed (I know it can be done in a
>> number of other ways, just want to do it with sed).
>> 
>> I tried sed -e 's/^J//g' but sed came up with the message sed command
>> garbled (^J is Ctrl-V Ctrl-J to literally insert a newline).
>> 
>> How can I add the newline in the search pattern so that the sed
>> command will work (SunOS 5.9)?
>> 
>> Regards,
>> George
>
>I can't fully explain how this work, but I tested it under bsd and solaris:
>
>  sed -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n//;ta' 
>
>
>
>bash-3.00# uname -r
>5.10
>bash-3.00# cat >> sedtest
>line1
>line2
>line3
>line4
>bash-3.00# sed -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n//;ta' sedtest
>line1line2line3line4
>
>
>
>

In emacs what I do is set fill-column to some huge number 
and then do M-q (refill the paragraph -- width is 
so wide (fill-column) that whole "paragraph" ends up on one (long) line.

Maybe vim also has such a command, to re "fill" a "paragraph".

And long, long ago I recall running some tool to do that -- was it "fmt",
perhaps?

David