How to arrange words in a single row using sed or awk?

Question

My file contents:

Google
Facebook
yahoo
cisco
juniper
oracle
firetide
attack

I wanted to convert the above words(column) into a row as shown below:

Google Facebook yahoo cisco juniper oracle firetide attack

NOTE : There should be a single space between each word.

Please suggest me a way to achieve this using sed or awk.

Thanks in advance.

possible duplicate of [sed: How can I replace a newline (\n)?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1251999/sed-how-can-i-replace-a-newline-n) — Avinash Raj, Dec 10 '14 at 07:55

John1024 · Answer 1 · 2014-12-10T07:42:58.640

If shell solutions are allowable, then try:

$ echo $(cat inputfile) 
Google Facebook yahoo cisco juniper oracle firetide attack

The above should work with any POSIX shell. With bash:

$ echo $(<inputfile) 
Google Facebook yahoo cisco juniper oracle firetide attack

If we really must use awk or sed, then here is a sed solution:

$ sed ':a;N;$!ba; s/\n/ /g' inputfile
Google Facebook yahoo cisco juniper oracle firetide attack

The above reads the whole file in (:a;N;$!ba) and then replaces all newlines with spaces (s/\n/ /g).

If the input file might contain extra spaces at the beginning for end of a line, we can remove them:

$ sed ':a;N;$!ba; s/[[:space:]]*\n[[:space:]]*/ /g' inputfile
Google Facebook yahoo cisco juniper oracle firetide attack

nu11p01n73R · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-10T08:54:22.430

2

Using awk

$ awk 'ORS=FS' inputFile
Google Facebook yahoo cisco juniper oracle firetide attack

OR

Another variation would be

$ awk 1 ORS=' ' input
Google Facebook yahoo cisco juniper oracle firetide attack

edited Dec 10 '14 at 08:54

answered Dec 10 '14 at 07:19

nu11p01n73R

@Kumar You are wlecome :) – nu11p01n73R Dec 10 '14 at 07:25
@Jotne But it wont change the record separators, it still remains as `\n` – nu11p01n73R Dec 10 '14 at 08:45
1

A small variation `awk 1 ORS=' ' inputfile` – Jotne Dec 10 '14 at 08:49
@Jotne That is shorter :D Would you mind me adding to my answer? – nu11p01n73R Dec 10 '14 at 08:51

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 10 '14 at 08:57

1

Here is another way to do it:

xargs <file
Google Facebook yahoo cisco juniper oracle firetide attack

This also give a newline at the end unlike the awk posted.

answered Dec 10 '14 at 08:57

Jotne

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 10 '14 at 07:32

0

Using tr :

tr '\n' ' ' < File

answered Dec 10 '14 at 07:32

Arjun Mathew Dan

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 10 '14 at 07:33

0

With awk:

awk '{printf "%s ", $0}' file

answered Dec 10 '14 at 07:33

pkalinow

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Dec 10 '14 at 07:39

0

sed -n '1h;1!H;${x;s/ *\n */ /gp;}' YourFile

replace starting / ending space and new line by a simple space (so any starting space will be removed ).

answered Dec 10 '14 at 07:39

NeronLeVelu

6 Answers6