How to replace newlines with tab characters?

Question

I have pattern like below

hi
hello
hallo
greetings
salutations
no more hello for you

I am trying to replace all newlines with tab using the following command

sed -e "s_/\n_/\t_g"

but it's not working.

Could anybody please help? I'm looking for a solution in sed/awk.

Answer 1

Here tr is better, I think:

tr "\n" "\t" < newlines 

As Nifle suggested in a comment, newlines here is the name of the file holding the original text.

Because sed is so line-oriented, it's more complicated to use in a case like this.

Answer 2

not sure about output you want

# awk -vRS="\n" -vORS="\t" '1' file
hi      hello   hallo   greetings       salutations     no more hello for you