Re: howto join lines

[Norman Gaywood]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 03:55:08PM -0400, Chris Tyler wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 14:40 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > > > > > i want to have those lines joined to one line with
> > > > >
> > > > > spaces
> > > > > > Before :
> > > > > >
> > > > > > textone
> > > > > > texttwo
> > > > > > something
> > > > > >
> > > > > > After :
> > > > > >
> > > > > > textone texttwo something
> >
> > echo `cat multi_line_file`
> > or
> > echo $(cat multi_line_file`)
>
> Or to avoid the fork & exec:
> echo $(<multi_line_file)

But you will end up with problems with the number of arguments on a
command line if multi_line_file is too large.

How about:

cat multi_line_file | xargs

Note that the default command for xargs is echo

Or, to avoid a "useless use of cat" award (see
http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html):

xargs < multi_line_file