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

You can use awk like this to combine ever 2 pair of lines:

awk '{ if (NR%2 != 0) line=$0; else {printf("%s %s\n", line, $0); line="";} } \
     END {if (length(line)) print line;}' flle