Translate (tr) Examples

May 11, 2025

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Squeeze white spaces.

The following will replace a sequence of repeated character with a single character.

echo "Mary had  a  little   lamb." | tr -s " "

Split input.

The following will translate (convert) a whitespace to a newline.

ls | tr " " "\n"

This is similar to

ls | sed -e 's/ /\n/g'`

Join input.

The following will translate (convert) a newline to a whitespace.

ls -1 | tr "\n" " "