This might sound a dumb question and i imagine the answers very basic but how would I turn a file with lots of lines into one file with one line with the same contents.

So I've got a file like this:

CUSTOMER
name John
surname Smith
telephone number 379471
age 22

and I would like it like this:

name John surname Smith telephone number 379471 age 22

I need to do it in bash

On a seperate note is there any way of adding text from one file to another? I've got another customer file id like to add to the end of this one.

Thanks a lot, help is much appreciated

python -c "print (''.join(file('filename').readlines())).replace('\n', ' ')" does the first thing

'cat file1 file2 > file1' will do the trick about copying.

To add text to the bottom of a file you would use >> instead of > because the second method overwrites the entire file with the entire contents of the first one.
cat file.txt >> file1.txt

Thanks for all the help, I really appreciate it! I should of got the cat thing, spose i just didnt research enough. I'm still having problems putting all values onto one line because i cant use python. Its bash only

I'm thinking sed would do it, I just havent worked out how to do it. I can only use bash though


Thanks everyone

Here's one way to get rid of the newline ( \n ) and output to another file. Don't forget the difference between > and >>

This also kills the last newline (\n) which is not what you'd want normally.

Notice the prompt on the same line. What you'd probably want is:

Just my 2p.

[also kills the last newline] ... in which case you want this:

$ echo `cat nn | tr '\n' ' '`

Actually the post was spot on, it did exactly what I wanted and my nasty bit of skoolwork is slowly developing into a fully functional bit of complex code.

Thanks for your help everyone and for super quick responses!