How to replace space using sed in shell script

Ashok_mittal · 09-08-2008, 06:48 AM

Hi All,

I want to use sed to replace multiple spaces with single character(say : ).
ex: test.txt

12:Mit 23627 83763 tty message

suppose the file test.txt contains the line as above and i want to replace all spaces with : so that the outcome should be like below:

12:Mit:23627:83763:tty:message

i have used

sed 's/ /:/g' test.txt

but this command replacing every single space with a :, so the output is like:

12:Mit:::23627:83763::::tty:::::::message

colucix · 09-08-2008, 06:57 AM

Use the + modifer to match one or more occurences of the previous regular expression. It needs to be escaped:

Code:

$ echo "12:Mit     23627   83763   tty message" | sed 's/ \+/:/g'
12:Mit:23627:83763:tty:message

jschiwal · 09-08-2008, 07:05 AM

You could use tr instead:

Code:

tr -s ' ' ':' <inputfile >outputfile