Question

I have a file that, occasionally, has split lines. The split is signaled by the fact that the line starts with ‘+’ (possibly preceeded by spaces).

line 1
line 2
  + continue 2
line 3
...

I’d like join the split line back:

line 1
line 2 continue 2
line 3
...

using sed. I’m not clear how to join a line with the preceeding one.

Any suggestion?

Answer 1

This might work for you:

sed 'N;s/\n\s*+//;P;D' file

---

These are actually four commands:

• N
  Append line from the input file to the pattern space
• s/\n\s*+//
  Remove newline, following whitespace and the plus
• P
  print line from the pattern space until the first newline
• D
  delete line from the pattern space until the first newline, e.g. the part which was just printed

---

The relevant manual page parts are

• Selecting lines by numbers
• Addresses overview
• Multiline techniques – using D,G,H,N,P to process multiple lines

To add 1 or more + lines, use:

sed ':a;N;s/\n\s*+//;ta;P;D' file