I tried to remove all newlines in a pipe like this:
(echo foo; echo bar) | sed -e :a -e N -e '$!ba' -e 's/\n/ /g' | hexdump -C
Which results on debian squeeze in:
00000000 66 6f 6f 20 62 61 72 0a |foo bar.|
00000008
Not removing the trailing newline.
tr -d '\n' as in How do I remove newlines from a text file? works just fine but isn't sed.
Sorry can't be done using sed, please see: http://sed.sourceforge.net/sedfaq5.html#s5.10 and a discussion here: http://objectmix.com/awk/26812-sed-remove-last-new-line-2.html
Looks like sed will add back the \n if it is present as the last character.