UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Dear UNIX experts:

Hi, I have a text file which the contents are arranged vertically down, line by line.
How do use a loop (I think) to make it arrange in vertical arrangement with a tab delimitated and write to a new file?

Eg: of source file
Hello World
Good-day
Thanks
Welcome

The expected output :-
Hello World Good-day Thanks Welcome



Thanks in advance.

Try this :

cat file.txt | sed 's/$/ /g' | tr -d "\n"


Cheers
Rahul

How about

Code:

tr '\n' '\t' <inputfile >outputfile

Vino

thanks for sharing... it don't even need a loop!

I hv another question... if I want to seperate the data by two "**" in between, why the below don't work? Hv I miss out something? the output only has one '*' in between which I expect two


tr '\n' '**' < inputfile > outputfile


thanks

Try this. I just escaped the *'s

Code:

tr '\n' '\*\*' <inputfile>outputfile

Havnt tested it tho'.

vino

They will not work. tr stands for translate a character. You can translate a character into another character. But not into 2 characters. (Am i wrong ?)

Reason for the above not working, the \n is replaced with the first * only. If there is another character in SET1, then it will be replaced with the corresponsing character in SET2.

Here is a sed solution will convert your outputfile from the tr command into the pattern you need.

Code:

sed -e 's/\(\*\)/\1\1/g' outputfile

Vino