How to join multiple lines of file names into one with custom delimiter

Question

I would like to join the result of ls -1 into one line and delimit it with whatever i want   Are there any standard Linux commands I can use to achieve this

User · Accepted Answer

Similar to the very first option but omits the trailing delimiter   ls -1   paste -sd     -

User · Answer

Adding on top of majkinetor s answer  here is the way of removing trailing delimiter since I cannot just comment under his answer yet    ls -1   awk  ORS        head -c -1   Just remove as many trailing bytes as your delimiter counts for   I like this approach because I can use multi character delimiters   other benefits of awk   ls -1   awk  ORS         head -c -2   EDIT  As Peter has noticed  negative byte count is not supported in native MacOS version of head  This however can be easily fixed   First  install coreutils   The GNU Core Utilities are the basic file  shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system    brew install coreutils   Commands also provided by MacOS are installed with the prefix  g   For example gls   Once you have done this you can use ghead which has negative byte count  or better  make alias   alias head  ghead

User · Answer

ls has the option -m to delimit the output with      a comma and a space   ls -m   tr -d       tr           piping this result to tr to remove either the space or the comma will allow you to pipe the result again to tr to replace the delimiter   in my example i replace the delimiter   with the delimiter    replace   with whatever one character delimiter you prefer since tr only accounts for the first character in the strings you pass in as arguments

User · Answer

If you version of xargs supports the -d flag then this should work  ls    xargs -d  -L 1 echo   -d is the delimiter flag  If you do not have -d  then you can try the following  ls   xargs -I    echo       xargs echo   The first xargs allows you to specify your delimiter which is a comma in this example

User · Answer

To avoid potential newline confusion for tr we could add the -b flag to ls   ls -1b   tr   n

User · Answer

You can use chomp to merge multiple line in single line   perl -e  while   lt      if           chomp    print     bad0  test  put line break condition in if statement It can be special character or any delimiter

User · Answer

ls produces one column output when connected to a pipe  so the -1 is redundant   Here s another perl answer using the builtin join function which doesn t leave a trailing delimiter   ls   perl -F  n  -0777 -anE  say join       F    The obscure -0777 makes perl read all the input before running the program   sed alternative that doesn t leave a trailing delimiter  ls   sed    s         tr -d   n

User · Answer

This replaces the last comma with a newline   ls -1   tr   n        sed  s     n     ls -m includes newlines at the screen-width character  80th for example    Mostly Bash  only ls is external    saveIFS  IFS  IFS    n  files    ls -1   IFS   list   files     IFS  saveIFS   Using readarray  aka mapfile  in Bash 4   readarray -t files  lt   lt  ls -1  saveIFS  IFS IFS   list   files     IFS  saveIFS   Thanks to gniourf gniourf for the suggestions

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The combination of setting IFS and use of      can do what you want  I m using a subshell so I don t interfere with this shell s  IFS   set --    IFS    echo         To capture the output   output   set --    IFS    echo

User · Answer

Parsing ls in general is not advised  so alternative better way is to use find  for example   find   -type f -print0   tr   0        Or by using find and paste   find   -type f   paste -d  -s   For general joining multiple lines  not related to file system   check  Concise and portable    join    on the Unix command-line

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Quick Perl version with trailing slash handling   ls -1   perl -E  say join       map  chomp       lt  gt     To explain    perl -E  execute Perl with features supports  say       say  print with a carrier return join       ARRAY HERE  join an array with      map  chomp      ROWS  remove from each line the carrier return and return the result  lt    stdin  each line is a ROW  coupling with a map it will create an array of each ROW

User · Answer

just bash  mystring   printf   s      echo   mystring

User · Answer

You can use   ls -1   perl -pe  s  n  some delimiter

User · Answer

I think this one is awesome  ls -1   awk  ORS        ORS is the  output record separator  so now your lines will be joined with a comma

User · Answer

If Python3 is your cup of tea  you can do this  but please explain why you would    ls -1   python -c  quot import sys  print     join sys stdin read   splitlines     quot

User · Answer

It looks like the answers already exist   If you want a  b  c format  use ls -m   Tulains C  rdova   s answer   Or if you want a b c format  use ls   xargs  simpified version of Chris J   s answer   Or if you want any other delimiter like    use ls   paste -sd     application of Artem   s answer

User · Answer

Python answer above is interesting  but the own language can even make the output nice   ls -1   python -c  quot import sys  print sys stdin read   splitlines    quot

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sed -e  a -e     N  s  n   n   ta   filename    Explanation   -e - denotes a command to be executed     a - is a label       N - defines the scope of the match for the current and the  N ext line    s  n   n   - replaces all EOL with  n    ta  - goto label a if the match is successful  Taken from my blog

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This command is for the PERL fans    ls -1   perl -l40pe0   Here 40 is the octal ascii code for space   -p will process line by line and print   -l will take care of replacing the trailing  n with the ascii character we provide   -e is to inform PERL we are doing command line execution   0 means that there is actually no command to execute   perl -e0 is same as perl -e

User · Answer

EDIT  Simply  ls -m  If you want your delimiter to be a comma   Ah  the power and simplicity    ls -1   tr   n        Change the comma     to whatever you want   Note that this includes a  trailing comma

User · Answer

Don t reinvent the wheel   ls -m   It does exactly that

User · Answer

The sed way   sed -e   a  N    ba  s  n   g       a           label called  a      N            append next line into Pattern Space  see info sed        ba         if it s the last line     do not     jump to  b  label  a  a  - break loop     s  n   g     any substitution you want   Note   This is linear in complexity  substituting only once after all lines are appended into sed s Pattern Space    AnandRajaseka s answer  and some other similar answers  such as here  are O n     because sed has to do substitute every time a new line is appended into the Pattern Space   To compare   seq 1 100000   sed   a  N    ba  s  n   g    head -c 80     linear  in less than 0 1s seq 1 100000   sed   a     N  s  n     ta    head -c 80     quadratic  hung

[linux] How to join multiple lines of file names into one with custom delimiter?

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