Unix - combine all rows into a comma-separated single row

Question

I have following values in a file in separate lines:
California
New York
Washington
South Carolina
Kansas

What would be unix script to disp

Answer 1

Use this command tr '\n' ',' < input_file

For single quotes use sed -e "s/^/'/" input_file | sed -e "s/$/'/" | tr '\n' ','

(Not tested for single/double quote escaping issues)

For variable NEW_VAR=$(echo $VAR | sed -e "s/^/'/" | sed -e "s/$/'/" | tr '\n' ',')

Answer 2

You need to use awk to format the output. Does sed and awk ring a bell?

The file <test.txt>
California
New York
Washington
South Carolina
Kansas

$ grep input file | awk '{print}' ORS=', '

California, New York, Washington, South Carolina, Kansas

Then concatenate your string and look out for the proper output.

with awk you can try this

sudo awk -F'\n' '{if(NR == 1) {printf "\x27" $0 "\x27"} else {print "," "\x27" $0 "\x27"}}' test.txt

'California','New York','Washington','South Carolina','Kansas'

You can also try this

sudo awk 'BEGIN {RS=""}{gsub(/\n/,"\x27,\x27",$0); print $0}' test.txt