Question

I have a file looking like this,

"xxxxxx"
"yyyyyy"
"aaaaaa"
"cccccc"
"bbbbbb"
"eeeeee"
"oooooo"
"zzzzzz"

Wanting to replace each \n in this file I use:

tr '\n' ',' < INPUT > OUTPUT

Which works fine. The output is to be expected:

"xxxxxx","yyyyyy","aaaaaa","cccccc"....

However

I can’t do any manipulation using sed or awk on this file, none what so ever (the result is always blank, like: sed 's/,/hello/g' displays nothing), in Linux using the GNU package this works fine, but with non GNU not. Can anyone tell me why this is?

Answer 1

Maybe it is because you replaced the last newline with a comma. So non GNU sed and awk just stop on end of file and do not parse the line because it is not terminated by \n.