How can I replace a newline (\n) using sed?

sed
hhh picture hhh · Aug 9, 2009 · Viewed 1.8M times · Source

How can I replace a newline ("\n") with a space ("") using the sed command?

I unsuccessfully tried: 

sed 's#\n# #g' file
sed 's#^$# #g' file

How do I fix it?

Answer

dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten picture dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten · Aug 9, 2009

sed is intended to be used on line-based input. Although it can do what you need.

A better option here is to use the tr command as follows:

tr '\n' ' ' < input_filename

or remove the newline characters entirely:

tr -d '\n' < input.txt > output.txt

or if you have the GNU version (with its long options)

tr --delete '\n' < input.txt > output.txt

Related questions

How to delete from a text file, all lines that contain a specific string?

How would I use sed to delete all lines in a text file that contain a specific string?

Read More
Find and replace in file and overwrite file doesn't work, it empties the file

I would like to run a find and replace on an HTML file through the command line. My command looks something like this: sed -e s/STRING_TO_REPLACE/STRING_TO_REPLACE_IT/g index.html > index.html When …

Read More
How can I remove the first line of a text file using bash/sed script?

I need to repeatedly remove the first line from a huge text file using a bash script. Right now I am using sed -i -e "1d" $FILE - but it takes around a minute to do the deletion. Is there …

Read More