Joining lines in a file

[Dave Walley]

Hi.

I have a file with 50 lines, I want to join the second line onto the first the fourth onto the third and so on. Can anybody help please.

Thanks

Dave

[Thierry Poels_1]

hi,

with "ed":

ed $yourfile << [EOT]
,g/.*/.,.+1j
w
q
[EOT]

Many other solutions available. There will be Perl variants here in no time.

good luck,
Thierry.

[Mark Grant · Accepted solution]

while read one
do
read two
echo "$one $two"
done < filename

[Graham Cameron_1]

awk '{printf "%s", $0;getline;print}' yourfile

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Probably the simplest approach is to use 'tr' to translate ASCII linefeeds (octal 012's) to spaces, viz:

tr '\012' ' ' < oldfile > newfile

[Mark Grant]

A. Clay Stephenso

Mightily impressed with your general ability to compress an entire flight controll system into about a three line shell script (particulary loved your loading "bc" as a co-process solution some time ago) but surely this particular solution will output the whole file as one line.

Please let me know if I am mis-reading this.

[Tim Sanko]

I would grant that you seem to be correct, Mark