Gfilui

This is related to a question i asked in overflow, It remains unanswered so i though I'd try asking it in segments

My objective is to return the special n function, If i were to run

echo -e "My name is nnick rock and i nlive by the sea shore." > file

Then when i cat that file you get something like this

My name is
nick rock and i
live by the sea shore.

What I'm looking to do is reverse the n return function, so when i echo the file with something like this

echo -aoE '([a-zA-Z])1,5' file

output
My 
name 
is
nick 
rock 
and 
i
live 
by 
the 
sea 
shore.

I'll get this instead

My name is nick rock and i live by the sea shore

What you're looking for is

$ tr 'n' ' ' < file
My name is nick rock and i live by the sea shore. 

tr utility is for translating sets of characters, in this there's only one character n in SET1 and space in SET2. As for < file, that just redirects the file into program's stdin stream.

But if for some reason you need a shell-only way, then this is sufficient:

$ while IFS= read -r line || [ -n "$line" ]; do printf "%s " "$line" ; done < file
My name is nick rock and i live by the sea shore. 

you can use this command line, it's an improvement of @Sergiv Kolodyazhnyy which print the n at the right place

while IFS= read -r line || [ -n "$line" ]; do printf "%s " "$line" ; printf "n" ; done < test.txt 

(sorry to not be able to comment)

You can also echo unquoted command-substitution:

echo $(<infile)

Here are some options:

1. 
   

   using awk, with an unset record separator (aka 'paragraph mode') and the default field separator

   
   
   

   awk -vRS= '$1=$1 1' file
   My name is nick rock and i live by the sea shore.
   

   
   


2. 
   

   using xargs with no explicit command

   
   
   

   $ xargs < file
   My name is nick rock and i live by the sea shore.
   

   
   


3. 
   

   using fmt from GNU coreutils:

   
   
   

   $ fmt file
   My name is nick rock and i live by the sea shore.