I have an ASCII file on a Solaris UNIX system.  Some lines in the file
end with a continuation character \ then a newline character then the
line continues on the next line.  Lines are never broken into more
than two lines.

I need a vi command or a sed command that will remove the continuation
character and concatenate the two lines into one full line (with a
newline at the end).

# if a line ends with a backslash, append the next line to it
 sed -e :a -e '/\\$/N; s/\\\n//; ta'


This file is invaluable for anybody ever needing to do any text
processing on a system containing sed:
http://www.student.northpark.edu/pemente/sed/sed1line.txt

If no exact match for what you want to do is there, you can generally
find a similar solution that'll put you well in the right direction.

---

Clarification of Answer by bookface-ga on 09 Aug 2006 10:51 PDT

Thanks for choosing Google! Answers!

---

Request for Answer Clarification by philnj-ga on 09 Aug 2006 11:12 PDT

Thanks for the extremely fast response. 

I am getting a space character where the continuation character (\)
was.  This must be removed.

This file has over 45000 line, so automated processing is critical.

---

Request for Answer Clarification by philnj-ga on 14 Aug 2006 05:54 PDT

Still waiting for clarification.  Can't rate the answer until then.  I
am getting a space character where the continuation character (\) was.
 Please modify the command to remove this extra space character.

Are you sure there was not already a space before the escaped newline
in the input data? This sed command will not replace the newline with
a space.  The
's/\\\n//' portion of the command means replace backslash and newline
with nothing.  If you copied this down instead of cut and paste it
make sure there is no space between the last two slashes of this part
of the command.

If this was a space before the escaped newline in the original input,
you can remove that one as well by changing the command very slightly
to:
sed -e :a -e '/\\$/N; s/ \\\n//; ta'

Note the space after "s/".