manipulate a Unix file (stream) to lines

nails August 12, 2011 at 11:43:22

What version of Unix are you using? By definition, if your file is a stream of characters, the file is one long line. The older legacy Unix (i.e. Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc ) tools will fail with a "line too long error". The GNU Linux tools generally don't have this problem - at least I have never seen it: This command has the best chance of working: perl -wpl -e 's/~/~\n/g;' file.txt > newfile.txt

Thank you very much Nails; this does the job beautifully.