Shell Programming and Scripting

An approach with awk:

Code:

awk '/&$/{sub("&$","");printf $0;next}1' file

Ok For the sed thing you might try to use GNU sed if available on your OS.

hi Zaxxon,

ur script is working only when i give like below format
CASE 1:
sed -e :a -e '/&$/ {
> N
> s/&\n//
> }
> ta' infile
But if i give

CASE 2:
" sed -e :a -e '/&$/ {N; s/&\n//}; ta' infile"
can u tel me what was the problem for above line?
I tried different different cases...

CASE 3:
"sed -e :a -e '/&$/ { N; s/&\n//;}; ta' infile"
above line gives output only first iteration
that means it checks '&' only once.


$> cat infile
abcdefgh&
ijklmnopqr&
stuvw&
xyz
some
more bla

OUTPUT coming like this
abcdefghijklmnopqr&
stuvwxyz
some
more bla

NOTE : Im using solaris...gsed command not there..

thanks in advance.......

At first:
Please use CODE-tags when you display code, data or logs. It really enchances readability, formatting and preserves special characters. It could happen that you might get a warning or a charge on bits of your forum account if you proceed like that

Hm...
:a is a label and as long as the condition is true ie. the last character in the line is a & it should start over at the label :a. :ta just says "if-true-go-to-a.

I am not sure but I have something similar on AIX where I have only a plain sed. It seems it is expecting the commands inside the curled bracket one per line. Here the problem I get like you got:

Code:

> sed -e :a -e '/&$/ {N; s/&\n//}; ta' infile
sed: 0602-404 Function /&$/ {N; s/&\n//}; ta cannot be parsed.

Here changed so it is working:

Code:

$> sed -e :a -e '/&$/ {
> N
> s/&\n//
> }
> ta' infile
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
some
more bla

Code:

undef $/;
$str=<DATA>;
my @arr=split(/(?:[^&])\n/,$str);
map {s/&[^:]*:\s*//g} @arr;
print join "\n", @arr;
__DATA__
line 1 : return abcdefgh&
line 2 : ijklmnopqr&
line 3 : stuvw&
line 4 : xyz
line 1 : return abcdefgh&
line 2 : ijklmnopqr&
line 3 : stuvw&
line 4 : xyz
line 1 : return abcdefgh&
line 2 : ijklmnopqr&
line 3 : stuvw&
line 4 : xyz