I map a key in vi to help me join two lines together and then move to the next line. Rinse and repeat. This is part of the process to help me shuffle some #EXTM3U style playlists for my portable music player.

I map the key [ to do the following:-
1. Go to the end of the line ($)
2. Join two lines together (J)
3. Down arrow key to go to next line.

Like this in vi:-

:map [ $J(CTRLV)(DOWN ARROW KEY)(PRESS RETURN KEY)

This works well except for the fact that some playlists may have 6000 lines in them. In which case, I sit there for a minute or so holding my finger down on the [ key.

My question is this. Is there a simple command in vi that I can use to achieve the same result? Or is there a more elegant way to do this, perhaps with sed or awk etc?

Thanks for your help.

Quick and dirty.

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allend, Thanks for that. This works well if I first convert the playlist to unix format from dos format using dos2unix. I added --delimiters="" to the paste command so that the output did not have a TAB at the joined point.

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Thanks for reporting back on your success. I did think of the delimiter after posting, but I did not consider the DOS style line endings.

What is the point of using awk here?
will do the same.

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cute - I woulda used sed. Silly me.

Obviously none, when you put it that way!

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Not silly at all. If I were to edit the file in place, I'd use sed as well
@OP. From inside vi, the command would be
or
if you want to join lines without spaces.

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@shruggy - Sheeite! Smash it out of the park with 'paste', then smash it out of the park with 'sed' then smash it out of the park with 'vi'.
Way-cool.

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Thank you to everyone who replied. I will now sit down and write a script that does everything I need to do to automatically massage these playlists so I don't have to do it all manually.