replacing /n with newline with ed.

[Jonathan Corbeill]

I am trying to replace a string in a file "/n" with a carriage return. the man page on ed uses the following example:
cat - << EOF | ed -s file-1
1,$ s/abc/xyz/
w file-2
q
EOF

how do i specify that i want to replace with a newline?

I've tried
cat - << EOF | ed -s file-1
1,$ s/\n/\r/g
w file-2
q
EOF

but that replaces the \n with the \r.

[Steve Steel]

Hi


In ed or vi

type ControlVEnter which will show ^M

This is a new line.


Steve Steel

[Steve Steel]

Hi


By enter I mean the return key


Or type ControlVControlM


Steve Steel

[Rui Soares]

Hi Jonathan,

Under the context of the ed command you're trying you'll need to "escape" the slash just before the "r" that represents the carriage return.

So use double slash:

\and press return to change line (then you just finnish the line).

Instead of:

\n

Good Luck,

Rumagoso

[Rui Soares]

Oops,

my post was victim of escaping!!!!
You should have seen:
\\that is double-slash instead of \\and

[Jonathan Corbeill]

Great input guys,
I'm almost there...

My current command looks like this:

cat - << EOF | ed -s work.txt
1,$ s/n/^M/g
w work2.txt
q
EOF

all occurences of the letter n are replaced with carriage returns. Thats mostly what I want but the backslash stays in the file. How do I say that i want the backslash and the n to be replaced?

[Ceesjan van Hattum]

Instead of using editor commands, you can also use a oneliner script:

awk 'BEGIN{FS="/n"}{
for (i=1;i<=NF;i++){
printf "%s\n",$i^J }
printf "\n";
}' infile > uitfile

FS is the fieldseperator to be replaced by 'n.
I tried it for multiple lines and works just fine.

Regards,
Ceesjan

[Darrell Allen]

How about a sed version:

sed 's,/n,,g' file-1 >file-2

This can be entered from command line or in a script. Note it really is 2 lines (the first ending with "\").

Darrell

[Darrell Allen]

Okay, it didn't post correctly. Let's try again.

sed 's,/n,
,g' file-1 >file-2

Darrell

[Darrell Allen]

It still didn't post correctly. There is supposed to be a "\" at the end of the first line.

Let's try it as an attachment.

Darrell