how can i return the output of a text

Question

This is related to a question i asked in overflow, It remains unanswered so i though I'd try asking it in segments

My objective is to return the special \n function, If i were to run

echo -e "My name is \nnick rock and i \nlive by the sea shore." > file

Then when i cat that file you get something like this

My name is
nick rock and i
live by the sea shore.

What I'm looking to do is reverse the \n return function, so when i echo the file with something like this

echo -aoE '([a-zA-Z]){1,5}' file

output
My 
name 
is
nick 
rock 
and 
i
live 
by 
the 
sea 
shore.

I'll get this instead

My name is nick rock and i live by the sea shore

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 29 '18 at 08:41

1

you can use this command line, it's an improvement of @Sergiv Kolodyazhnyy which print the \n at the right place

while IFS= read -r line || [ -n "$line" ]; do printf "%s " "$line" ; printf "\n" ; done < test.txt

(sorry to not be able to comment)

answered May 29 '18 at 08:41

damadam

2,833

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 29 '18 at 11:08

1

You can also echo unquoted command-substitution:

echo $(<infile)

answered May 29 '18 at 11:08

αғsнιη

35,660

I like this one, but one should be aware that this will replace every sequence of characters in $IFS (usually space,newline,tab) by one space character. – danzel May 29 '18 at 11:26
.... which is how word spliting is happening here – αғsнιη May 29 '18 at 12:02

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 29 '18 at 08:33

What you're looking for is

$ tr  '\n' ' ' < file
My name is  nick rock and i  live by the sea shore.

tr utility is for translating sets of characters, in this there's only one character \n in SET1 and space in SET2. As for < file, that just redirects the file into program's stdin stream.

But if for some reason you need a shell-only way, then this is sufficient:

$ while IFS= read -r line || [ -n "$line" ]; do printf "%s " "$line" ; done < file
My name is  nick rock and i  live by the sea shore.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 29 '18 at 10:49

Here are some options:

using awk, with an unset record separator (aka 'paragraph mode') and the default field separator
```
awk -vRS= '{$1=$1} 1' file
My name is nick rock and i live by the sea shore.
```

using xargs with no explicit command

$ xargs < file
My name is nick rock and i live by the sea shore.

using fmt from GNU coreutils:

$ fmt file
My name is nick rock and i live by the sea shore.

how can i return the output of a text

4 Answers4