Joining multiple lines into one with bash

Question

I would like to join the result of ls -1 into one line and delimit it with whatever i want.

Are there any standard linux commands i can use to achieve this?

Answer 1

If you version of xargs supports the -d flag then this should work

ls  | xargs -d, -L 1 echo

-d is the delimiter flag

If you do not have -d, then you can try the following

ls | xargs -I {} echo {}, | xargs echo

The first xargs allows you to specify your delimiter which is a comma in this example.

Answer 2

EDIT: If your delimiter is a comma then the following also works ls -m

Ah, the power and simplicity !

ls -1 | tr "\\n" ","

Change the "," to whatever you want.

Answer 3

You can use:

ls -1 | perl -pe 's/\n$/some_delimiter/'

Answer 4

To avoid potential newline confusion for tr we could add the -b flag to ls:

ls -1b | tr '\n' ';'

Answer 5

This replaces the last comma with a newline:

ls -1 | tr '\n' ',' | sed 's/,$/\n/'

ls -m includes newlines at the screen-width character (80th for example).

Mostly Bash (only ls is external):

files=($(ls -1))
list=${files[@]/%/,}
list=${list%*,}

Answer 6

just bash

mystring=$(printf "%s|" *)
echo ${mystring%|}