hi, i have a file that has about 4500 rows. this was an old microsoft access databse and what i am trying to do is take out the old extra \n newline characters but not take out the "true" newline character. I will explain.


i was trying to write a regular expression, but that was not working so i thought PERL would be the best option. The collums are seperated by commas.

Here is the dataset that i am working against.

144,20050892.0, Replacement of IN-FOCUS projector-Bldg 123, Replace malfunctioning In-Focus projector with new one.,- In-Focus projectors are used to project slideshows and other pertinent data to fron mountred screens.

- Intermittent power up problem, kicks on and off. This project was originally in Sept 2001.
- Bulbs have been replaced when it does work it is barely readable.,Infocus LP 640 XGA LCD Multimedia Projector $1699 EA


www.infocus.com,2005-09-29 00:00:00,2005-10-29 00:00:00,Joe Blow user
my phone number 5551212,5,0,3,None,,1,2005-10-12 00:00:00,C

Pretty much i need to remove the extra \n newline characters without removing the end one. This is what the dataset should look like.

144,20050892.0, Replacement of IN-FOCUS projector-Bldg 123, Replace malfunctioning In-Focus projector with new one.,- In-Focus projectors are used to project slideshows and other pertinent data to fron mountred screens. - Intermittent power up problem, kicks on and off. This project as originally in Sept 2001. - Bulbs have been replaced when it does work it is barely readable.,Infocus LP 640 XGA LCD Multimedia Projector $1699 EA
www.infocus.com,2005-09-29 00:00:00,2005-10-29 00:00:00,Joe Blow user my phone number 5551212,5,0,3,None,,1,2005-10-12 00:00:00,C

The fist column, in this case is 144, and they are numbered sequentially. So the next one would be 145.

can i do this with standard UNIX regular expressions or would PERL be better?

Thanks

This uses the sequence numbers to remove line breaks...

awk -F, 'NR==1{c=$1+1}$1!=c{printf "%s ",$0}$1==c{c++;printf "\n%s",$0}END{printf ORS}' file1 > file2