I have a file containing most of the records equal to a length of 193 characters. However some lines are split into 2 lines (surely not to more than 2 lines). Using sed I want to append the next line to all such lines having a length of less than 193 chars so that all lines contain 193 characters. How can I do that ?

I'm not smart enough with sed to solve this problem. I can probably do it with awk. Let me know if you are interested in that solution.

That will also do. Thanks for the response. Please provide the solution using awk.

#!/bin/ksh # if line is less than 193 characters, append the next line to it awk ' BEGIN { reclen=193 } { if(length($0) < reclen) { printf("%s", $0) getline printf("%s\n", $0) } else printf("%s\n", $0) } ' myfile.txt