Chomp alternatives? Remove newline/carriage-returns

[lahonda_99]

Is there a command that I can use through the command prompt to remove all newlines from a file? I would like the text in a text file to be in one straight line.

Is there a perl script that I could use that would accomplish the same thing? I don't know how to pass a file to chomp, so I would appreciate it if the code could be shown to me.

Any other ways that you can think of? The KATE editor does not remove newlines, unfortunately.

Thank you for reading!

[CodeRoot]

Here is a very simple 'standard input to standard output' version:

#!/usr/bin/perl
while (<>) { chomp; print; }

Use:

[name of perl program] <input_file >output_file

This will, of course, place the first character of each line directly after the last character of the previous line. If you want the newline to be replaced with a space, you could do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
 while (<>) { chomp; printf("%s ", $_); }

This will, of course, add an [unnecessary] space at the end of the one-line output -- which, if you don't care, that is great -- but, if you do, then more code will be required...

[lahonda_99]

I greatly appreciate your help! I had found a bash command in these forums months ago to do the same thing, but I searched for an hour and couldn't find it again. I'm okay with using PERL, but for curiousity's sake would you know of the command that I have described?

[anomie]

Here's an awk way to do it.

[hector@troy ~]$ cat some-file 
this
should
all
be
on
one
line

[hector@troy ~]$ awk '{ str1=str1 $0 }END{ print str1 }' some-file 
thisshouldallbeononeline

[hector@troy ~]$ awk '{ str1=str1 $0 " "}END{ print str1 }' some-file 
this should all be on one line

First example is with no spaces, second example puts spaces between each concatenated line.

But if you have carriage returns in the mix as well, that may be a different issue. (You might have to strip them out.)

[CodeRoot]

This will translate newlines into spaces:

tr "\n" " " <input_file >output_file