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From: subbarao@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kartik Subbarao)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: sed to remove newlines?
Message-ID: <azUjc369xzzXQ@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 30 May 91 01:20:14 GMT
References: <6356@iron6.UUCP>
Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU
Reply-To: subbarao@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kartik Subbarao)
Distribution: comp.unix.shell
Organization: American Chemical Society
Lines: 41

In article <6356@iron6.UUCP> yeates@motcid.UUCP (Tony J Yeates) writes:
>Is it possible to remove newlines (i.e. \n) from a file using sed?  If
>so how?  We have tried various things without success:
>
>escaping \n -> \\n
>double escaping \n -> \\\n
>using \012
>
>but with no success.  Our man page incs. the following:-
>
>"\n   Matches a NEWLINE embedded in the pattern space. "
>

ugh, sed..

>If this can only be used for pattern matching but not exchange, it would seem
>to offer nothing over the use of $.
>
>[Our current requirement is to concatenate any lines ending with a ':' to  the
>next line in a file.   Although I can think of numerous other uses ( we
>usually end up using tr '\012' '<some char.>' as a work around).]

I can do this without thinking in perl :-) :

perl -ne 'chop if (/:$/); print;'

sed....umm, I tried a bunch of line-noise-like looking things, none of
which worked. For some reason I couldn't get everything except the
terminating newline in a pattern. Oh well, I'm sure tons of other people
know how :-)

			-Kartik

sed -nm

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