what is the benefit of --squeeze-repeats in tr command

Question

What is the benefit of -s or --squeeze-repeats when we use tr? What practical usage?

jw013 · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-14T16:55:19.920

4

The GNU coreutils manual gives some example applications such as collapsing multiple newlines into one (tr -s '\n'), or putting each word on its own line while removing punctuation at the same time (tr -cs '[:alnum:]' '[\n*]').

edited Feb 14 '12 at 16:55

answered Feb 14 '12 at 16:48

jw013

51,212

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

2

How to make the 'cut' command treat several sequential delimiters as one?

$ cat text.txt | tr -s " " " " | cut -d " " -f 4

edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

Community

1

answered Feb 14 '12 at 16:46

kev

966

1

< text.txt tr -s ' ' | cut -d' ' -f 4 is shorter: it leaves out the unnecessary second argument to tr and the UUOC. – jw013 Feb 14 '12 at 16:52

what is the benefit of --squeeze-repeats in tr command

2 Answers2