Each word on a separate line

Question

I have a sentence like

This is for example

I want to write this to a file such that each word in this sentence is written to a separate line.

How can I do this in shell scripting?

Answer 1

A couple ways to go about it, choose your favorite!

echo "This is for example" | tr ' ' '\n' > example.txt

or simply do this to avoid using echo unnecessarily:

tr ' ' '\n' <<< "This is for example" > example.txt

The <<< notation is used with a herestring

Or, use sed instead of tr:

sed "s/ /\n/g" <<< "This is for example" > example.txt

For still more alternatives, check others' answers =)

Answer 2

$ echo "This is for example" | xargs -n1
This
is
for
example

Answer 3

Try using :

string="This is for example"

printf '%s\n' $string > filename.txt

or taking advantage of bash word-splitting

string="This is for example"

for word in $string; do
    echo "$word"
done > filename.txt