Hi folks,

I am trying to figure out how to join two lines on one line of text. For example, I have a text file with the following text:

TEXT LINE1
0
TEXT LINE2
0
TEXT LINE2
234
TEXT LINE3
236
... and so on.

I want it to look as follows:

TEXT LINE1 0
TEXT LINE2 0
TEXT LINE3 234
TEXT LINE4 236
... and so on.

How would I do it?

Thanks for you help...
A real novice.

Hi:

Here's a sed solution:

sed '$!N;s/\n/ /' myfile

but I'd use paste:

paste -s -d" \n" myfile

Nails,

The paste option worked nicely. However, I received a garbled message for sed option. I'll use paste instead. Since this worked for one, how can I do multiples? For example:

TEXT LINE1
0
0
TEXT LINE2
0
234
... on so on.

I'd like to look as follows:

TEXT LINE1 0 0
TEXT LINE2 0 234
.. and so on.

Thanks for you help!

Try this:

#change the num to the lines you want to join
num=3
count=$num
cat textfile | while read lines
do
if [ "$count" != "1" ]; then
echo $lines | tr '\n' ' '
count=`expr $count - 1`
else
echo $lines
count=$num
fi
done

Hi Vicchai,

Thanks for your suggestion. I used Nails paste command suggestion to perform the task. tmp1.dat contained the above text and numbers.

cat tmp1.dat | paste - - - > tmp2.dat

tmp2.dat contains the numbers on the same line as the text line.

Thanks.

To the question:

how can I do multiples? For example:

TEXT LINE1
0
0
TEXT LINE2
0
234
... on so on.

I'd like to look as follows:

TEXT LINE1 0 0
TEXT LINE2 0 234
.. and so on.

Use:

paste -s -d" \n" p

Luke Chi