How to convert rows into space-delimited line and vice versa

Last updated on September 20, 2020 by Dan Nanni

As part of text-file batching processing job, if you would like to convert rows into a space-delimited line, or replace spaces with line break (or newline), you can use command line utilities such as tr and awk. The tr command can perform simple character translation or deletion on input text file, while the awk utility can perform more powerful pattern scanning and processing on input file. So these tools can be quite useful in any kind of shell scripts.

$ cat intput.txt

apple
mango
watermelon
orange
pineapple
kiwi

$ cat input.txt | tr "n" " "

apple mango watermelon orange pineapple kiwi

$ cat intput2.txt

january february march april may

sed -e 's/\s\+/\n/g' input2.txt

january
february
march
april
may

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