Question

File1:

hello
- dictionary definitions:
hi
hello
hallo
greetings
salutations
no more hello for you
-
world
- dictionary definitions:
universe
everything
the globe
the biggest tree
planet
cess pool of organic life
-

I need to format this (for a huge list of words) into a term to definition format (one line per term). How can one achieve this? None of the words are the same, only the structure seen above is. The resultant file would look something like this:

hello    - dictionary definitions:    hi    hello    hallo    greetings    salutations    no more hello for you    -
world    - dictionary definitions:    universe    everything    the globe    the biggest tree    planet    cess pool of organic life    -

Awk/Sed/Grep/Cat are the usual contenders.

Answer 1

awk 'BEGIN {FS="\n"; RS="-\n"}{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) printf("%s   ",$i); if($1)print"-";}' dict.txt

outputs:

hello   - dictionary definitions:   hi   hello   hallo   greetings   salutations   no more hello for you   -
world   - dictionary definitions:   universe   everything   the globe   the biggest tree   planet   cess pool of organic life   -