How to merge every two lines into one from the command line?

Question

I have a text file with the following format. The first line is the \"KEY\" and the second line is the \"VALUE\".

KEY 4048:1736 string
3
KEY 0:1772 string
1         


        

Answer 1

awk:

awk 'NR%2{printf "%s ",$0;next;}1' yourFile

note, there is an empty line at the end of output.

sed:

sed 'N;s/\n/ /' yourFile