Shell Programming and Scripting

Using ls input as example..

Code:

ls | sed 's/\n/ /'

outputs with line breaks, where I was expecting the \n to disappear. I've tried \r as well wondering if terminal output used different breaks.

Is there a way to remove the line breaks without saving to file and then working from there?

---------- Post updated at 06:18 PM ---------- Previous update was at 06:03 PM ----------

hmm.. found the solution is a less than obvious

Code:

ls | sed -n -e ":a" -e "$ s/\n/ /gp;N;b a"

Code:

ls | tr '\n' ' '

The problem with sed and newlines is it's line-based; it reads in text line by line, stopping at the newline but not including it in the pattern. It'll never be matched because it wasn't there in the first place... The problem becomes not deleting newlines, but stopping sed from printing them in the first place; hence complicated, impractical things like mashing it into one giant string so it only prints once.