Comments on: rmnl — remove new line characters with tr, awk, perl, sed or c/c++

By: Greg Benison

Greg Benison — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:43:03 +0000

Sometimes you don't want to remove *all* of the newlines - for example to keep paragraphs intact. Here's a way to do that:

http://gcbenison.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/a-program-to-intelligently-remove-carriage-returns-so-you-can-paste-text-without-having-it-look-awful/

By: Scott Severtson

Scott Severtson — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 01:54:16 +0000

Paste, a specialized line-joining utility available on most Unixes:
# Without spaces
paste -sd " days.txt
# With spaces
paste -sd ' ' days.txt

An AWK alternative syntax that I prefer:
# Without spaces
awk 'BEGIN{ORS=""} {print}' days.txt
# With spaces
awk 'BEGIN{ORS=" "} {print}' days.txt
# Skip blank lines, with spaces
awk 'BEGIN{ORS=" "} $0 != "" {print}' days.txt

By: antoniomu

antoniomu — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 04:05:01 +0000

its a very usefull article

By: nilperlinux

nilperlinux — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 09:58:56 +0000

thanks for the idea

By: joewalp

joewalp — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:50:33 +0000

I found the awk solution to be useful because it works when tailing a logfile, as in:
tail -f -n 100000 misc.log | sed –unbuffered -n -e 's/.* APPEND finalize $.$/\1/p' | awk '{ printf "%s", $0 }'

By: aa

aa — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:46:41 +0000

Watch out for cr+lf, as sometimes created with windows programs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline

By: malef

malef — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:28:32 +0000

thanks a lot! I have been looking for these sed solutions.

By: Sayid Munawar

Sayid Munawar — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:42:59 +0000

thanks !

saved my day

By: Aidas Kasparas

Aidas Kasparas — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:57:04 +0000

If you need to change newlines to spaces (or any other symbol) in perl there is an option

perl -pl40 -e "

By: elmimmo

elmimmo — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 09:15:22 +0000

All this commands output to stdin, but how do I overwrite the original file with the new ouput?

By: Reemplaça múltiples linies de text amb el sed! | GNULinux.cat

Reemplaça múltiples linies de text amb el sed! | GNULinux.cat — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 05:08:52 +0000

[…] a aquesta web vaig trobar la solució. Ja que el sed no reconeix la sintaxi obia que seria se […]

By: I need a shell script to delete files wich location should be read from a log file

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:48:39 +0000

[…] list-tools Hi, I found this blog informative… http://linux.dsplabs.com.au/rmnl-rem…-sam-ssam-p65/ […]

By: [SOLVED] simple sed question

[SOLVED] simple sed question — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:03:50 +0000

[…] http://linux.dsplabs.com.au/rmnl-rem…-sam-ssam-p65/ […]

By: Amanda

Amanda — Wed, 12 May 2010 17:33:19 +0000

Wow! So many options to chose from, great reference!

By: Lietuva

Lietuva — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:51:15 +0000

Thank you very much for this article.

By: Omkar

Omkar — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 02:35:09 +0000

Awesome man! And this is how powerful linux is. Something like this in windows is almost impossible!

By: i bashed my ls « RixBuntu

i bashed my ls « RixBuntu — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:20:10 +0000

[…] thanks to Linux Blog for the tutorial on removing new line characters with a variety of tools (tr, awk, perl, sed, […]

By: rofrol's status on Monday, 19-Oct-09 12:31:06 UTC - Identi.ca

rofrol's status on Monday, 19-Oct-09 12:31:06 UTC - Identi.ca — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:31:09 +0000

[…] http://linux.dsplabs.com.au/rmnl-remove-new-line-characters-tr-awk-perl-sed-c-cpp-bash-python-xargs… a few seconds ago from web […]

By: Search & Replace Strings Considering the whole file (non line-based) using ’sed’ command « Saminda Wijeratne’s Weblog

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:55:09 +0000

[…] so anyway what you have to do is pretty simple. either you have to format your input to remove the new line characters and feed that as the input and somehow reintroduce the newline character after sed was applied, or feed the whole input to sed in a non-line-based form. Anyway found this on the net. http://linux.dsplabs.com.au/rmnl-remove-new-line-characters-tr-awk-perl-sed-c-cpp-bash-python-xargs…. […]

By: How to make a HTTP Requst from command line « Identity Management , SOA, Testing, Monitoring

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:07:46 +0000

[…] http://linux.dsplabs.com.au/rmnl-http://linux.dsplabs.com.au/rmnl-remove-new-line-characters-tr-awk-perl-sed-c-cpp-bash-python-xargs-ghc-ghci-haskell-sam-ssam-p65/remove-new-line-characters-tr-awk-perl-sed-c-cpp-bash-python-xargs-ghc-ghci-haskell-sam-ssam-p65/ […]

By: Reemplaça múltiples linies de text amb el sed! « alliberats.org

Reemplaça múltiples linies de text amb el sed! « alliberats.org — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:46:51 +0000

[…] a aquesta web vaig trobar la solució. Ja que el sed no reconeix la sintaxi obia que seria se […]

By: guillem

guillem — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:30:11 +0000

With this code

sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g'

You saved my life. Many thanks

I was wandering why is not as easy with sed to delete two consequitive lines as:

sed 's|firs-line\second\line||g'

Cheers from catalonia

By: rmnl — remove new line characters with tr, awk, perl, sed or C/C++ : Linux T&T

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:49:47 +0000

[…] Linux Blog » rmnl — remove new line characters with tr, awk, perl, sed or C/C++ […]

By: tatwright

tatwright — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 01:43:13 +0000

In perl you could use

perl -p -e "chomp;"

By: Arjun

Arjun — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:37:19 +0000

Awesome! I was pulling out my hair for quite some time trying to do this with sed, thanks for the post!