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

perl -0pE 's{^KEY.*?\K\s+(\d+)$}{ $1}msg;' data.txt > data_merged-lines.txt

-0 gobbles the whole file instead of reading it line-by-line;
pE wraps code with loop and prints the output, see details in http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun.html;
^KEY match "KEY" in the beginning of line, followed by non-greedy match of anything (.*?) before sequence of

1. one or more spaces \s+ of any kind including line breaks;
2. one or more digit (\d+) which we capture and later re-insert as $1;

followed by the end of line $.

\K conveniently excludes everything on its left hand side from substitution so { $1} replaces only 1-2 sequence, see http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html.