I am trying to take the contents of one file (fruit) that looks like this:
apples
pears
bananas

and copy that data to another file (fruit2) in one long line separated by commas, with no extra space after text:

apples,pears,bananas

Any help would be much appreciated!

Brian

Show us your work.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...#faq_lqwelcome

1 members found this post helpful.

You could do that several ways, simple shell script or simple sed expression or awk for something you could more easily extend such as for multiple columns or more selective handling.

Do you have exposure to any of those? If so just think about the problem in the context of your skill set and see where that leads.

For examaple, if shell scripting think about a read loop. Or for sed think multi-line replacement. Or for awk think in terms of records and input/output record separators. Also consider whether you might want them reordered (sorted), allow duplicates, etc.

And to get you started, here is a working sed expression:
...and a hint for awk, with a suitable ORS it reduces to a single print $0 operation.

For each of the above cases, a simple file redirect will put it into the output file of your choice.

Simpler to use tr egI leave it to the OP to do a litle clean up, redirect to file fruit2, remove the trailing comma and add a new line, I aint doing all his homework!

That's one of the good things about Linux, multiple solutions.

I am just learning text manipulation, so no I don't have any exposure to awk or sed yet. I'll do a little research on them tonight and see if I can use that to make this work, thanks for your assistance!

Brian

Thank you for the point in the right direction!!

Brian

You are welcome!

Good luck in your learning experience!

Sed and awk are the go-to tools for text manipulation on a Unix/Linux system and are well worth learning! Neither is difficult, but can sometimes appear a little obscure on first contact by new users. Just take a deep breath and work a few examples and you'll be using them for literally everything before you know it!

There are many tutorials for both online, a quick DuckDuckGo turned up these which look useful:

* SED Tutorial; Learn Linux SED
* Sed - An Introduction and Tutorial
* And from the same author, Awk - A Tutorial
* A Guided Tour of Awk
* And of course the wikipedia pages for sed, and awk


You'll see that both sed and awk rely on regular expressions, so it is worth learning a little about those as a separate topic (although most sed and awk tutorials will necessarily include the basics).

* This page looks like it has everything you will ever want to know about regular expressions!
* Or the more tutorial, Regular Expressions from Princeton

Those should provide enough examples to get you started, and enough detail if you really want to learn it from the ground up!

So, get yourself oriented and work a few examples, and let us know if you need help past the bumps!

So I was able to accomplish what I needed for my assignment using the following commands:

cat file | xargs | sed -e 's/ /,/g'

I used that based on stuff I found last night with the wonderful google machine. I also read up on the sed command and understand that portion of it. I am struggling with xargs though. I would not have even used it if I didn't find a similar situation and solution on stack overflow. So I understand cat, but why I am I piping to xargs and what exactly is it? Thanks again for answering some questions!

Brian