Concise and portable “join” on the Unix command-line

Question

How can I join multiple lines into one line, with a separator where the new-line characters were, and avoiding a trailing separator and, optionally, ignoring empty lines?

Answer 1

This sed one-line should work -

sed -e :a -e 'N;s/\n/,/;ba' file

Test:

[jaypal:~/Temp] cat file
foo
bar
baz

[jaypal:~/Temp] sed -e :a -e 'N;s/\n/,/;ba' file
foo,bar,baz

To handle empty lines, you can remove the empty lines and pipe it to the above one-liner.

sed -e '/^$/d' file | sed -e :a -e 'N;s/\n/,/;ba'