UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I want to use sed to look for spaces in text and when find one move the next word to the next line.

I used:

sed 's/ /\n/g' out > new

However when there is more than one space between two words it adds more lines between them. And I just want the words to be one under another. How can I change that?

Thanks

I find out how to do this:

sed '/^$/d'

However when I'm using emacs and put this two commands in one line they don't want to work:

#! /bin/bash
sed 's/ /\n/g' | sed '/^$/d' out > new

What I'm doing wrong???

Use awk:

Code:

% cat file
word word  word    word
word     word 
     word
% awk '$1=$1' RS= OFS="\n" file
word
word
word
word
word
word
word

On Solaris use nawk or /usr/bin/awk .

Or with tr:

Code:

% tr -s ' ' '\n' <file
word
word
word
word
word
word
word

awk '{ for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) { print $i } }' filename