Replacing characters in file with line break

johnemb · #1 (**permalink**) 04-24-2007

Hi,

Apologies if this has been asked before, but I searched and was not able to find an answer. It's probably a simple question to answer for those of you with some experience, though...

I have a relatively long string where tokens are separated by the colon (':') character. Let's say the string is stored in a file, 'longString.txt'. The string may look something like this:

Code:

/home/user/tmp/myDir/file1.log:/home/user/tmp/myOldDir/file3.txt:/usr/local/java/bin/javac

I want to separate each token with a line break instead of a colon, so that long strings are easy to read for humans. How do I do this easily from a (bash) shell command line?

I tried with tr and sed, but even if I get to replace ':' with '\n', the '\n' is apparently not interpreted as a line break in the resulting output. Sed example:

Code:

$ /usr/bin/sed 's/:/\\n/g' longString.txt > readableString.txt
$ cat readableString.txt
/home/user/tmp/myDir/file1.log\n/home/user/tmp/myOldDir/file3.txt\n/usr/local/java/bin/javac

napster_san · #2 (**permalink**) 04-24-2007

do not escape the \ for \n

use sed 's/:/\n/'

vino · #3 (**permalink**) 04-24-2007

This worked for me

Code:

tr ":" "\n" < longString.txt

anbu23 · #4 (**permalink**) 04-24-2007

Code:

/usr/bin/sed 's/:/\\
/g' longString.txt > readableString.txt

Code:

tr ':' '\n' < longString.txt > readableString.txt

Code:

awk -F":" -v OFS="\n" ' $1=$1 ' longString.txt > readableString.txt

johnemb · #5 (**permalink**) 04-24-2007

Thank you all for such quick responses!

I tried all the suggestions, but of the ones listed so far only the last one from anbu23 works for me:

Code:

awk -F":" -v OFS="\n" ' $1=$1 ' longString.txt > readableString.txt

but it only works with one of the three awk binaries installed on my system (I don't have control over what is actually installed).

Could this have something to do with for example the version of sed and tr I am using (I'm not sure which version that is)? Or my environment settings (nothing special there I think)? I'm running Solaris 10 and the Bash shell in a networked environment. Some other results:

Unescaped '\n' with sed:

Code:

$ /usr/bin/sed 's/:/\n/g' longString.txt
/home/user/tmp/myDir/file1.logn/home/user/tmp/myOldDir/file3.txtn/usr/local/java/bin/javac

(I also tried other sed variants installed on my system)

Vino's and anbu23's suggestions using tr gives the same results for me as the above sed command.

anbu23's sed command:

Code:

$ /usr/bin/sed 's/:/\\
> /g' longString.txt > readableString.txt
sed: command garbled: s/:/\\

(or:

Code:

sed: Ending delimiter missing on substitution: s/:/\\

depending on sed variant).

anbu23 · #6 (**permalink**) 04-24-2007

Use double quotes

Code:

/usr/bin/sed "s/:/\\
/g" longString.txt > readableString.txt

If you have perl

Code:

perl -ne ' s/:/\n/g; print ' longString.txt > readableString.txt

johnemb · #7 (**permalink**) 04-24-2007

Thanks anbu23, those work as well

Do you have any idea why the somewhat simpler sed and tr commands won't work for me?

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