How to concatenate multiple lines of output to one line?

Piping output to xargs will concatenate each line of output to a single line with spaces:

grep pattern file | xargs

Or any command, eg. ls | xargs. The default limit of xargs output is ~4096 characters, but can be increased with eg. xargs -s 8192.

grep xargs

Use tr '\n' ' ' to translate all newline characters to spaces:

$ grep pattern file | tr '\n' ' '

Note: grep reads files, cat concatenates files. Don't cat file | grep!

Edit:

tr can only handle single character translations. You could use awk to change the output record separator like:

$ grep pattern file | awk '{print}' ORS='" '

This would transform:

one
two 
three

to:

one" two" three"

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