howto join lines

[Chris Tyler]

On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 14:40 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> >
> >>>> i want to have those lines joined to one line with
> >>> spaces
> >>>> Before :
> >>>>
> >>>> textone
> >>>> texttwo
> >>>> something
> >>>>
> >>>> After :
> >>>>
> >>>> textone texttwo something
> >>>>
> 
> >> the good old command line "cat" was invented (I am told) to concatenate!
> > 
> > 'cat' will not remove newlines.
> 
> Not by itself, but its a reasonable thing to run in backticks so the 
> shell will do it for you:
> 
> echo `cat multi_line_file`
> or
> echo $(cat multi_line_file`)

Or to avoid the fork & exec:

    echo $(<multi_line_file)

-Chris