UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I have a file that has 316 byte records. I would like to read in the file and combine Record#1 with Recod#2, Record #3 with Record #4, etc to create an output file with 632 byte records.

I was looking into using "awk" but I'm not sure if it will do what I need.

Any suggestions on a quick and dirty way to accomplish this task?

Thanks

Assuming that you have an even umber of records in the file try this:

Code:

while [ `read record1 && read record2`  ]
do    
      echo "$record1" "$record2"
done < inputfile > outputfile

I tried the code suggested above, but came up with an empty output file.

I need to make sure that the first field of each 316 byte record is the same before combining them. So I decided to put the odd numbered records in one file and the even numbered records in a second file and then use the “join” command to put them together (join odd_recs even_recs > joined_recs).

I expected the output file to have 632 byte records. I used awk (awk '{print length($0)}' joined_recs) to check the lengths of the records in the output file and they had various lengths.

Any ideas?

I was looking into the records in my output file, and it seems that any number of “spaces” were converted to a single “space”.

Is it possible to retain the exact content of each file record when they are “unioned” together?

You could try using paste, e.g....

Code:

$ cat file
1111111111111111111111111111111
2222222222222222222222222222222
3333333333333333333333333333333
4444444444444444444444444444444

$ paste -s -d '\0\n' file
11111111111111111111111111111112222222222222222222222222222222
33333333333333333333333333333334444444444444444444444444444444