search between keywords and make a single line

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

have a very big file where need to format it like below

example file:

abcd today
is
great
day;

search keyword 'abcd' and append to it all words till we reach ; to make it a single line.

output should look like.

abcd today is great day;

There are many occurrence of such paragraphs and text file also contain other lines which we do not want to touch.

2

Please do not try to oversimplify problems. State them as they stand. Also, provide a representative sample which shows all (or most of) the possible ways in which the input data might occur.

With lots of assumptions, try:

sed '/abcd/,/;/{
H
/;/{
      s/.*//
      x
      s/^\n//
      s/\n/ /g
      p
 }
d
}' file
1 Like
3 
$
$
$ cat f14
abcd today
is
great
day;
abcd
another one
over
here;
some
text
here;
and some more...
$
$
$
$ perl -ne 'chomp;
            if (/abcd/)         {$x .= $_; $in = 1}
            elsif (/;/ and $in) {print "$x $_\n"; $in = 0; $x = ""}
            elsif ($in)         {$x .= " $_"}
            else                {print $_,"\n"}
           ' f14
abcd today is great day;
abcd another one over here;
some
text
here;
and some more...
$
$
$ perl -0ne 'while (/^(abcd.*?;|.*)$/msg) {$x=$1; $x =~ s/\n/ /g if $x =~ m/abcd/; print "$x\n"}' f14
abcd today is great day;
abcd another one over here;
some
text
here;
and some more...

$
$
$

tyler_durden

1 Like