Another way of replacing newlines instead of using tr

Question

I use the command:

tr '\n' ' ' < input.txt > output.txt

to convert new lines to spaces using tr command.

It works fine for single files - but I have multiple files I need to run a single command on... similar to the following command for doing text swapping:

find /directory/. -type f -exec sed -i 's/oldtext/newtext/g' {} \;

Is there a command I can add to a bash script (like the one above using find) to remove \n?

Answer 1

This will work even without any loop for all filenames starting with file:

perl -pe 's/\n/ /g' file*

For such operations, i prefer perl. Has the same syntax with sed , is portable and don't have all those strange sed parameters. You can also apply -i switch to perl (like sed) to make in-place changes: perl -i.old -pe .... (old file will be backed up with extension .old -You can just use -i and no backup file will be kept)

If you prefer you can use your find command like this:

$ find . -type f -name 'file*' -exec bash -c 'tr "\n" " " <$0 >$0.new' {} \;

Answer 2

you could simply loop through the files you're looking to run the command on.

for file in ~/Desktop/*.txt
do
tr '\n' ' ' < "$file" > "$file"_output.txt
done;

Answer 3

perl -i -lpe '$\=$"' file.data

---

• -i turns ON in-place editing.
• -l sets ORS = RS = "\n"
• -p sets up an implicit input file read in + automatic print of records.
• $\ is the ORS which is set to $" = OFS = space by default.
• Of course you can give multiple filenames to the perl command.

Answer 4

This is the sed command you are looking for:

find /directory/. -type f -exec sed -i ':begin;$!N;s/\n/ /;tbegin' {} \;