[TriLUG] vi or sed or perl question - joining lines

[Mike Norwood]

Thanks for all the different ideas.  I tried the awk first (it looked 
shortest) but something is not working right, it appears to be giving me 
the right number of records, but is leaving out some of the data.  The vi 
would work but there are over 20000 lines which should combine to around 
1800 records, so it will take too long.  So, about the perl, would I just 
take what you have below into a script, then execute it with "scriptname 
myfile" > out.file?

Or is there any easy way to get vi to repeat the 12J command 1800 times?

Thanks again for the suggestions, Mike

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Andrew Perrin wrote:

> Boy, that's icky. I would probably do something like this:
> 
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> 
> my $line;
> my $i=1;
> while (<>) {
>  	chomp;
>  	$line .= $_;
>  	$i++;
>  	if ($i == 12) {
>  		print "$line\n";
>  		$i = 0;
>  		$line = "";
>  	}
> }
> print "$line\n" if $line;
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu - http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu
> Assistant Professor of Sociology; Book Review Editor, _Social Forces_
> University of North Carolina - CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA
> New Book: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/178592.ctl
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Mike Norwood wrote:
> 
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have a big goofy text file I need to get into a more usable format.
> > Basically what I need to do is join every 12 lines into 1 line, down
> > through the entire file.  Does anyone have a good suggestion on how to do
> > this?  I know that I must have done this same thing 2 years ago, because I
> > found an earlier version of this same data from May 2005 that I somehow
> > converted, but I now have no idea how it was done.
> >
> > Thanks, Mike
> >
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>