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

nawk '$0 ~ /string$/ {printf "%s ",$0; getline; printf "%s\n", $0}' filename

This reads as

$0 ~ /string$/  ## matches any lines that end with the word string
printf          ## so print the first line without newline
getline         ## get the next line
printf "%s\n"   ## print the whole line and carriage return