I am trying this to concatenate lines in a file with this command:

sed -ne '/|$/N/s/\\\n//p' test1.txt > test2.txt

but its not working.

I want to concatenate all lines that end with | between a "start_here" string and an "end_here" string.

So my file is like this:

"start_here"|
ldfjlsdffj|
93849340|
9034093|
"end_here"|
"start_here"|
ldfjlsdffj|
93849340|
9034093|
"end_here"|

...and it keeps repeating. But I want to concatenate everything between "start_here" and "end_here" to merge only the lines between and continue this throughout the file.

Any suggestions please?

Thanks a lot

what is the desired output given this sample input?

First I want to have:

"start_here"|ldfjlsdffj|93849340|9034093|"end_here "|
"start_here"|ldfjlsdffj|93849340|9034093|"end_here "|

Then I want to remove the "start_here" and "end_here" statements:

ldfjlsdffj|93849340|9034093|
ldfjlsdffj|93849340|9034093|

I guess I could probably do that in one step - this sed stuff is kind of new to me... Hopefully I'll catch on soon...

Hi old_farmer.
Just use this command line in awk:

awk '{if ($NF=="end_here|") printf "\n"; else if ($NF=="start_here|") printf ""; else printf $0}' test1.txt > test2.txt

You'll have the result you want.

bye bye,
ducasio