Question

I tried to remove all newlines in a pipe like this:

(echo foo; echo bar) | sed -e :a -e N -e '$!ba' -e 's/\n/ /g' | hexdump -C

Which results on debian squeeze in:

00000000  66 6f 6f 20 62 61 72 0a                           |foo bar.|
00000008

Not removing the trailing newline.

tr -d '\n' as in How do I remove newlines from a text file? works just fine but isn’t sed.

Answer 1

Sorry can’t be done using sed, please see:
http://sed.sourceforge.net/sedfaq5.html#s5.10
and a discussion here: http://objectmix.com/awk/26812-sed-remove-last-new-line-2.html

Looks like sed will add back the \n if it is present as the last character.