Substitute newline with double quotes

[e633]

Hi, i'm having a very hard time trying to substitute \n with " " (i.e, substitute newline with double quotes-space-double quotes). Call it "escaping hell" if you get the pun
I've been through many man pages and google searches but still i can't get this straight. I tried perl, tr, bare regex - you name it!
This command is the best working yet:

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cat pathlist | tr '\n' '" "' > pathlist2

but it just adds one single double quote:

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/home/e633/Desktop/uni
/home/e633/Desktop/network
/home/e633/Desktop/SSH config notes
/home/e633/Desktop/apache config notes

becomes:

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/home/e633/Desktop/uni"/home/e633/Desktop/network"/home/e633/Desktop/SSH config notes"/home/e633/Desktop/apache config notes"

instead i want it to be:

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"/home/e633/Desktop/uni" "/home/e633/Desktop/network" "/home/e633/Desktop/SSH config notes" "/home/e633/Desktop/apache config notes"

So i can use this string for creating a 7zip archive. BTW that newline-separated string is from $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS, as i'm writing a nice user-friendly ubuntu script.

[fredrik.eriksson]

Most likely it is doable in Bash... but this is alot easier done in perl. So I'm gonna go offtrack a bit.

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ls | perl -e 'foreach(split(/\n/,join("",(<>)))){print "$_\" \""}'


Code explained:
It basically reads STDIN, which in perl gives you an array, joins the array, then splits it by \n (which removes it) and then just prints every element in the array.

Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson

[e633]

Whoa... that one liner is impressive to say the least! Thanks a lot i'm gonna figure it out and try it ASAP!
(that's surely gonna cost me some bad headache)

[e633]

Almost there! Thought you'd like to know it's not yet correct:

From my shell:
e633@mypc:~/Desktop/network$ ls | perl -e 'foreach(split(/\n/,join("",(<>)))){print "$_\" \""}'
C05.PDF" "C 06.PDF" "C07.PDF" "C 0 8.PDF" "C09.PDF" "C10.PDF" "C11.PDF" "C12.PDF" "C13.PDF" "C 14.PDF" "C15.PDF" "C16.PDF" "C17.PDF" "C19.PDF" "C20.PDF" "C21.PDF" "checklist.doc" "INDEX.PDF" "[/color]
Red parts are wrong , output should begin and end with a single double quote

I'm trying to correct it by myself but if you're surely faster than me!

[thobbs]

Ahh... the magic of perl one-liners. This should fix it:

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ls | perl -e 'foreach(split(/\n/,join("",(<>)))){print "\"$_\" "}'


- thobbs

[e633]

Found a less obscure way for that:

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#This is an excerpt. I'm processing each argument one by one:
for (( i = 1; i <= $argsN; i++ )); do
   export params="$params\"$1\" "
   shift
done
length=${#params}
let "length -= 1"
params=${params:0:$length}     #Some final adjustment...
#Now $params contains a nice double-quote separated list of files.


EDIT: i've just realized $1 contains just the filename and not the absolute path. So i'm gonna need $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS and that ominous perl enchantment.
Just kidding, thanks a lot everybody! (again )

[m4n]

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-bash-3.2$ cat t
/home/e633/Desktop/uni
/home/e633/Desktop/network
/home/e633/Desktop/SSH config notes
/home/e633/Desktop/apache config notes
-bash-3.2$ while read line; do echo -n "\"$line\" "; done < t
"/home/e633/Desktop/uni" "/home/e633/Desktop/network" "/home/e633/Desktop/SSH config notes" "/home/e633/Desktop/apache config notes"

does this suit your requirement?

Jemshad

[crouse]

Just got to love how simple that was