Question

I’m using perl from command line to to replace duplicate spaces from a text file.

The command I use is:

perl -pi -e 's/\s+/ /g' file.csv

The problem: This procedure removes also the new lines in the resulting file….

Any idea why this occur?

Thanks!

Answer 1

\s means the five characters: [ \f\n\r\t]. So, you’re replacing newlines by single spaces.
In your case, the simplest way is to enable automatic line-ending processing with -l flag:

perl -pi -le 's/\s+/ /g' file.csv

This way, newlines will be chomped before -e statement and appended after.