Join consequent lines in unix

Friday, December 28, 2012 awk , perl , sed , unix 1 Comments

I have a file like this.

 John 30 Mike 0.0786268 Tyson 0.114889 Gabriel 0.176072 Fiona 0.101895 

I need to shift every second row to a new column so it should look like this

 John 30 Mike 0.0786268 Tyson 0.114889 Gabriel 0.176072 Fiona 0.101895 

There can be many solutions for this:
sed:

 sed 'N;s/\n/ /g' yourfile 

Awk:

 awk '{if(NR%2!=0){p=""}else{p="\n"};printf $0" "p}' your_file 

Paste:

 paste - - file new_file 

My pick is:

 xargs -n2