How to prevent grep from printing a trailing newline?

Question

I am using grep to produce output that will be parsed by another program.

However, that program expects output only to be numeric or zero-bytes.

No

Answer 1

Use tr -d to delete characters in a string:

$ grep -c ' ' /etc/passwd | tr -d '\n'
69$ grep -c ' ' /etc/passwd | tr -d '\n' | xxd 
0000000: 3639                                     69
$