Shell script to join a line to the line that follows it

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi All,

I need a shell script to join a line to the line that follows it. But I shouldn't do it for all the lines. I need to join a line having the character say '&' at the end of the line & need to join the line that follows it.

E.g

Input

  1. This is the first line &
  2. and the second line
  3. third line
  4. fourth line

Output

  1. This is the first line and the second line
  2. third line
  3. fourth line

Thanks
Shashi

2

try awk:

awk '{ if(index($0,"&")==length($0) ){
           sub(/&/,"",$0)
           printf("%s ", $0 )
       }
       else {
           print $0
       } }     ' filename

filename before

This is the first line &
and the second line
third line &
fourth line
line 5
line 6 &
line 7
line 8

results:

This is the first line  and the second line
third line  fourth line
line 5
line 6  line 7
line 8
3

The following concatenates lines with a trailing \
which is the usual requirement:

sed ':a; /\\$/N; s/\\\n//; ta'

So assuming your prepended numbers are only for illustration,
you want:

sed ':a; /&$/N; s/&\n//; ta'

If you do need prepened numbers then I guess you could
do something like:

cut -d. -f2- t |
sed ':a; /&$/N; s/&\n//; ta' |
cat -n

4

Hi,

Thanks for ur reply. But I am still facing problems. Could u please help me with using a file name.

Thanks
Shashi

5

I tried using both the ways but still no success. I might be doing in a wrong way

6

awk '{if ( $0 ~ /&$/ ) { printf "%s ",$0 } else { print $0 }'} filename|sed "s/&//"

7 
$ cat filename
This is the first line &
and the second line
third line &
fourth line
line 5
line 6 &
line 7
line 8

$ awk 'sub(/&$/,""){printf $0;next};1' filename
This is the first line and the second line
third line fourth line
line 5
line 6 line 7
line 8