Joining even and odd lines in a text file

Today I had to join even and odd lines in a text file. This cannot be done elegantly (i.e. withouth auxiliary variables and counters) in either Perl or awk so I turned to sed.

Short theory of how sed operates: it reads the current line in the pattern space and applies a command on the line if the line matches the address. There is also an auxiliary space called the hold space. After reading the sed manual, I came with the following solution:

sed -n -e '1~2h ; 2~2 { x ; G ; s/\n/ /; p}' file.txt > out.txt

The -n instructs sed to suppress the default output. The 1~2 is a GNU extension and specifies lines that give remainder of 1 when divided by 2. Thus, the first command copies the odd line into the hold space (the h command). The second command does the following:

• Exchange the hold space and the pattern space (x). Thus, the current (even) line is now in the hold space.
• G appends newline to the pattern space and after it the contents of the hold space - now we have concatenated the two lines, but with an extra newline.
• s/\n/ / is a regular expression that replaces the appended newline with a space.
• p prints the contents of the pattern space.
• {} group the commands matching the address.