Friday, April 15, 2011

Stripping EOL from output in BASH

Sometimes you have to text process the output of many chained commands, e.g. bash command to list all dev package in Debian. The results are usually outputted with "\n", e.g.

output1
output2
output3
output4
If the list is long enough your screen will scroll, and it will be hard to control the output without less. A solution is to strip the EOL marks with echo, for example compare:
getent passwd | cut -f 1 -d ":"
to:
echo $(getent passwd | cut -f 1 -d ":")

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