How to concatenate multiple lines of output to one line?

Question

If I run the command cat file | grep pattern, I get many lines of output. How do you concatenate all lines into one line, effectively replacing each \"\\n

Answer 1

In bash echo without quotes remove carriage returns, tabs and multiple spaces

echo $(cat file)

Answer 2

On red hat linux I just use echo :

echo $(cat /some/file/name)

This gives me all records of a file on just one line.

Answer 3

Use tr '\n' ' ' to translate all newline characters to spaces:

$ grep pattern file | tr '\n' ' '

Note: grep reads files, cat concatenates files. Don't cat file | grep!

Edit:

tr can only handle single character translations. You could use awk to change the output record separator like:

$ grep pattern file | awk '{print}' ORS='" '

This would transform:

one
two 
three

to:

one" two" three" 

Answer 4

This is an example which produces output separate by commas. You can replace the comma by whatever separator you need.

cat <<EOD | xargs | sed 's/ /,/g'
> 1
> 2
> 3
> 4
> 5
> EOD

produces:

1,2,3,4,5

Answer 5

Piping output to xargs will concatenate each line of output to a single line with spaces:

grep pattern file | xargs

Or any command, eg. ls | xargs. The default limit of xargs output is ~4096 characters, but can be increased with eg. xargs -s 8192.

grep xargs

Answer 6

I like the xargs solution, but if it's important to not collapse spaces, then one might instead do:

sed ':b;$!{N;bb};s/\n/ /g'

That will replace newlines for spaces, without substituting the last line terminator like tr '\n' ' ' would.

This also allows you to use other joining strings besides a space, like a comma, etc, something that xargs cannot do:

$ seq 1 5 | sed ':b;$!{N;bb};s/\n/,/g'
1,2,3,4,5