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I want to merge two files cat file1 file2 > file3. But it starts with new line. I don't want that. I could use tr to replace all new lines to space, but I can't do that, because there are new lines in files which I don't want to replace.

good_evening
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    does it? my cat (on cygwin) doesn't put any extra new lines before or after any of 2 files. Are you sure you don't have the new line in file1 or file2? – Kashyap Oct 12 '11 at 20:18
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    Can you clarify what `file1` and `file2` look like, and just what output you want in `file3`? Exactly what new lines do you want in the output, and what new lines don't you want? – Keith Thompson Oct 12 '11 at 21:16

4 Answers4

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You could use head with -1 as the -c flags parameter and -q

head -c -1 -q file1 file2 > file3

head -c -1 will output everything up to the last 1 byte of the code (in this case the last 1 byte - endline - wont be included). The -q is so the filenames dont get piped to file3 as head does by default when heading multiple files.

Or, as suggested by this answer - bash cat multiple files content in to single string without newlines , pipe it to tr:

tr -d "\n"
Community
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chown
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2

in bash, you can do:

cat <(sed -n '1n;p' file1) <(sed -n '1n;p' file2)
Michał Šrajer
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0

Try this:

user$ echo hi1 > file1       #for example
user$ echo hi2 > file2       #for example
user$ x=$(cat file1 file2)
user$ echo -n $x > file3
user$ cat file3
hi1 hi2                      #no newline is added.
Mohammad Kholghi
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-1

you ca use awk:

awk '(FNR>1){print}' file1 file2

update - how it works:

we ask awk to process two files: file1 and file2. It will print whole record (line) if condition (FNR>1) if true. FNR is a variable defined as:

FNR - The input record number in the current input file.

so, condition (FNR>1) will be true every time, except for the first line of each file. This way we skip first line of each file.

Michał Šrajer
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