Diogo Oliveira de Melo

Use sed to replace newline

Sed processes line by line; therefore, special syntax is needed to replace the newline char. For some darn reason, I keep forgetting this special syntax. Here is the command to replace newlines with a comma:

sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/,/g'

I got this code from this Stack Overflow question.

Update [2015-11-16]: If the idea is to drop / skip empty lines, you can use grep:

grep -v -e "^$"

Careful not to be fooled by white chars. If you also want to drop lines that have only white chars, you can use:

grep -v -e '^[[:space:]]*$'

I got the above tip from another Stack Overflow question.