CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellreplacenewline
pratik swami
pratik swami

Reputation: 11

I need to replace literal \n with newline in shell

We receive a file which is essentially an ssh token key. This upon inception has values, say 

Foo\nBarFoo,\nFoo\nBarFoo

Now, I want to replace these with 

Foo
BarFoo,
Foo
BarFoo

I have tried sed and tr commands by copying the entire key in a variable. One thing that seemed to work was : %s/\\n/\r/g, but this is not acceptable since I cannot open the vi editor.

I recently tried echo -e 'Foo\nBarFoo,\nFoo\nBarFoo, but want to be it more subtle.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 363

Answers (1)

Mihir Luthra
Mihir Luthra

Reputation: 6769

You are facing the problem because you are using OSX or BSD probably. With GNU sed, 's/\\n/\n/g’ should have worked.

For POSIX sed, use this,

echo "Foo\nBarFoo,\nFoo\nBarFoo" | sed 's/\\n/\
/g'

Upvotes: 3

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