How to merge every two lines into one from the command line?

Question

I have a text file with the following format. The first line is the \"KEY\" and the second line is the \"VALUE\".

KEY 4048:1736 string
3
KEY 0:1772 string
1         


        

Answer 1

paste is good for this job:

paste -d " "  - - < filename

Answer 2

You can use awk like this to combine ever 2 pair of lines:

awk '{ if (NR%2 != 0) line=$0; else {printf("%s %s\n", line, $0); line="";} } \
     END {if (length(line)) print line;}' flle

Answer 3

Alternative to sed, awk, grep:

xargs -n2 -d'\n'

This is best when you want to join N lines and you only need space delimited output.

My original answer was xargs -n2 which separates on words rather than lines. -d can be used to split the input by any single character.

Answer 4

In the case where I needed to combine two lines (for easier processing), but allow the data past the specific, I found this to be useful

data.txt

string1=x
string2=y
string3
string4

cat data.txt | nawk '$0 ~ /string1=/ { printf "%s ", $0; getline; printf "%s\n", $0; getline } { print }' > converted_data.txt

output then looks like:

converted_data.txt

string1=x string2=y
string3
string4

Answer 5

A more-general solution (allows for more than one follow-up line to be joined) as a shell script. This adds a line between each, because I needed visibility, but that is easily remedied. This example is where the "key" line ended in : and no other lines did.

#!/bin/bash
#
# join "The rest of the story" when the first line of each   story
# matches $PATTERN
# Nice for looking for specific changes in bart output
#

PATTERN='*:';
LINEOUT=""
while read line; do
    case $line in
        $PATTERN)
                echo ""
                echo $LINEOUT
                LINEOUT="$line"
                        ;;
        "")
                LINEOUT=""
                echo ""
                ;;

        *)      LINEOUT="$LINEOUT $line"
                ;;
    esac        
done

Answer 6

Try the following line:

while read line1; do read line2; echo "$line1 $line2"; done <old.txt>new_file

Put delimiter in-between

"$line1 $line2";

e.g. if the delimiter is |, then:

"$line1|$line2";