How to join multiple lines of file names into one

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

Adding on top of majkinetor's answer, here is the way of removing trailing delimiter(since I cannot just comment under his answer yet):

ls -1 | awk 'ORS=","' | head -c -1

Just remove as many trailing bytes as your delimiter counts for.

I like this approach because I can use multi character delimiters + other benefits of awk:

ls -1 | awk 'ORS=", "' | head -c -2

Answer 2

This command is for the PERL fans :

ls -1 | perl -l40pe0

Here 40 is the octal ascii code for space.

-p will process line by line and print

-l will take care of replacing the trailing \n with the ascii character we provide.

-e is to inform PERL we are doing command line execution.

0 means that there is actually no command to execute.

perl -e0 is same as perl -e ' '

Answer 3

You can use:

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

Answer 4

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):

saveIFS=$IFS; IFS=$'\n'
files=($(ls -1))
IFS=,
list=${files[*]}
IFS=$saveIFS

Using readarray (aka mapfile) in Bash 4:

readarray -t files < <(ls -1)
saveIFS=$IFS
IFS=,
list=${files[*]}
IFS=$saveIFS

Thanks to gniourf_gniourf for the suggestions.

Answer 5

EDIT: Simply "ls -m" If you want your delimiter to be a comma

Ah, the power and simplicity !

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

Change the comma "," to whatever you want. Note that this includes a "trailing comma"

Answer 6

Parsing ls in general is not advised, so alternative better way is to use find, for example:

find . -type f -print0 | tr '\0' ','

Or by using find and paste:

find . -type f | paste -d, -s

For general joining multiple lines (not related to file system), check: Concise and portable “join” on the Unix command-line.