sed help - replace line feed with different character

bradvan · 05-04-2009, 09:31 AM

I'm trying to take the output of a command which is listed on many lines (for example: rpm -qa | grep xorg) and change it to one line of output and replace the line feeds with some other character. I have:

Code:

sed -e '{
N
s/\n/;/
}'

which partially works, but it only catches every other line. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Thanks!

druuna · 05-04-2009, 10:41 AM

Hi,

2 things:

- Can this be done with sed: Yes -> sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/;/g' infile. I do believe (not my own sed oneliner) that this would involve using sed's buffer space, I'm not sure how big that space is. It could become an issue.

- Is there a better/other way: Yes -> tr '\n' ';' < infile

Hope this helps.

Robhogg · 05-04-2009, 10:48 AM

It's quite easy in Perl. Just pipe the output to:

Code:

perl -e 'while(<>){chomp;print "$_;";}'

This reads each line from STDIN - while(<>), strips the newline - chomp and prints the stripped line followed by a semi-colon - print "$_;" ($_ is a Perl default variable).

QED

rweaver · 05-04-2009, 10:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bradvan

I'm trying to take the output of a command which is listed on many lines (for example: rpm -qa | grep xorg) and change it to one line of output and replace the line feeds with some other character. I have:

Code:

sed -e '{
N
s/\n/;/
}'

which partially works, but it only catches every other line. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Thanks!

sed -n 'H;${g;s/\n//g;p}' filename

is the only way I know to do it using sed, but there are easier ways using tr and perl. Check it out, found this thread on LQ...

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ewline-530376/

Kenhelm · 05-04-2009, 11:31 AM

Another method

Code:

echo 'abc
def
ghi' | paste -sd';'
abc;def;ghi

bradvan · 05-04-2009, 12:40 PM

Thanks for the replies! I had tried the tr, but I must have messed up the syntax. What you supplied worked. The sed doesn't want to work on one line. It reports label too long. If I break it up so that :a is on it's own line, then it works. The perl worked also as well as the paste command (adding - to the end). Give a task to a group of programmers and most often you will get unique answers that accomplish that task.

Thanks to all!