How to convert privatekey into singleline

Sometimes you need to convert a file with newlines into a singleline, essentially turning newline characters into newline "\n", but that can be pretty difficult as most programs turns that into a actual newline, which is difficult to copy.

But using awk we can turn a file into a single line of text, perfect for a environment variable. However, remember that privatekeys shouldn't be stored in the environment for security reasons, it should live as a file.

$ awk -v ORS='\\n' '1' karnov-review.2019-01-21.private-key.pem | pbcopy

So this command uses awk, which is a really powerful tool to search files and execute commands on those.

The -v defines that you want to configure a value, ORS is stands for "output record separator", and that is because awk works on a per line, and we now tell it to join with a string.

And the last part '1' is to awk, because it needs a equation to run on each line, and 1 is always true.

Last we give it a filename to load and we finally pipe it into pbcopy that is a nice tool to put it into the clipboard.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Options.html#Options

https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Output-Separators.html