streaming a datafile in unix

[hugheskbh]

HI,

I was wondering if there's a way to stream a flat file into one large data stream in unix?

Thanks in advance for help.

 

[KenCunningham]

Can you give us a little more to be going on with? cat will 'stream' your file and can be redirected elsewhere. Presumably that's not what you require?

 

[hugheskbh]

Hi Ken,

I have a file that has one field, but instead of the data in the file presented horizonal, I would like it to be presented as one long data stream.

 

[feherke]

Hi

With or without separators ?

[gray]# separated with tabs[/gray]
tr '\n' '\t' < /input/file

[gray]# without separators[/gray]
tr -d '\n' < /input/file

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[SamBones]

To Unix, ALL files are just a stream of characters. There is no inherent concept of a record. A line-feed (LF) that terminates a line is just another character in the stream and must be interpretted by the application reading it as an end of record character.

So [tt]cat[/tt] is the correct answer to stream a file. Maybe also [tt]dd[/tt] depending on what you're doing.

Or, if you want it displayed one character at a time, maybe...

fold -w 1 /input/file

This looks like a stream of characters, but it's actually adding a LF after every character so it appears as a single character stream.

Please try to define what you're looking for more clearly.

 

[hugheskbh]

Thanks guys,

I'll give these examples a try and let you know what happens.