Bash script to remove line breaks?

Try doing this:

echo $(cat $1)

I found this relevant answer in stackoverflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1251999/sed-how-can-i-replace-a-newline-n

The quickest way appears to be using tr:

tr '\n' ' ' </your/file

or for your example:

cat `find $HOME '$1"` | tr '\n' ' '

To learn more about the tr command do, of course, man tr.

The stackoverflow anser contains ways to do this with sed (would have been my first choice, but sed is very line-oriented and getting it to not interpret line breaks as field delimiters is arcane) and a way using read and bash, close to your initial approach.