converting all records of a file in to one record

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have a file temp.dat. The contents of this file is as follows

abcdefgh
abcdefgh
abcdefgh
abcdefgh
abcdefgh
abcdefgh

The multiple records in this file needs to be converted in to a single record.

abcdefgh abcdefgh abcdefgh abcdefgh abcdefgh abcdefgh

2 
tr '\n' ' ' < temp.dat
OR
nawk '1' ORS=' ' temp.dat
3

awk '{printf $0 " " ;next}' filename

cheers,
Devaraj Takhellambam