Shell Programming and Scripting

I can't use "\n" in sed, i.e. the command: " ls | sed 's/\n/\t/g' " doesn't work.
Does anyone know about this?

Hello every one.
I found that this can be done by
tr "\n" "\t" .
If anyone know how to do this by "sed", please tell me.
Thank You.

If you are using sed and want to use \n then you should read the whole text into the pattern space and then carry out your sed command.

Something on the line like this.

Code:

sed -e '$!N; s/\n/\t/g' inputfile

Not tested tho'.

Vino

It works on Gentoo of gnu sed:

Code:

sed -n 'H;${g;s/\n/\t/g;p}'

Thanks a lot.
But these commands are not intuitive for us, i think.
Do you have any idea why "sed" forbid the simple expression above?

Read the sed FAQ - section 5.10

Cheers
ZB

When sed accepts a line, it strips off the \n at the end and that is the reason, you cant use a simple sed 's/\n/\t/g'.

But when you use N with sed, you can store multiple lines in the pattern-space of sed. In this case, sed embeds a newline character aka \n between the lines. So the pattern space looks like

Code:

line1\nline2\n...

Now the \n is visible to sed. And your simple sed command should work fine.

Vino