Alain Kelder is a Giant Dork

A case for “paste” instead of “tr” to replace newlines with spaces

Let's say I'm doing something that outputs stuff one item per line to the stdout:

foo@bar:~$ dpkg -l | grep sasl | awk '{print$2}' 

libsasl2-2
libsasl2-modules

Let's say I want to replace newlines with spaces.

Using "tr" works, but messes up the console:

foo@bar:~$ dpkg -l | grep sasl | awk '{print$2}' | tr '\n' ' '

libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules foo@bar:~$ 

Using "paste" works as well, and doesn't mess up the console:

foo@bar:~$ dpkg -l | grep sasl | awk '{print$2}' | paste -sd' '

libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules