How to convert space separated text to lines in Bash

Question

I have a simple string:

 foo bar boo you too

I'm looking for an easy way in bash on the command line (not in a script) to take this string in via a pipe or input redirection and convert it to

 foo
 bar
 boo
 you
 too

See [this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1853009/replace-all-whitespace-with-a-line-break-paragraph-mark-to-make-a-word-list). i.e. `tr ' ' '\n' <<< "$string"` (or use one of the better multi-space solutions from the post) — Reinstate Monica Please, Jul 11 '14 at 18:50

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 11 '14 at 18:50

7

You could use 'tr' to translate the space to a new line:

~$ echo 'foo bar boo you too' | tr ' ' '\n'
foo
bar
boo
you
too

answered Jul 11 '14 at 18:50

Andrew

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 11 '14 at 18:49

2

echo "one two three" | sed 's/ /\n/g'

answered Jul 11 '14 at 18:49

FuzzyTree

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 11 '14 at 18:47

0

A working solution using grep and regular expressions:

echo "foo bar boo you too" | grep -oE "[a-z]+"

answered Jul 11 '14 at 18:47

julienc

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 11 '14 at 18:53

0

[in Bash] lit.

$ echo "foo bar boo you too" | ( read -a A; printf '%s\n' "${A[@]}"; )
foo
bar
boo *
you
too

answered Jul 11 '14 at 18:53

konsolebox

4 Answers4