paste-original(1)

merge same lines of several files or subsequent lines of one file

From the original Amiga UNIX 2.1 manual. Some things it mentions may not be in this release.

With the coreutil package (with the extra set), see paste(1) instead.

NAME

paste - merge same lines of several files or subsequent lines of one file

SYNOPSIS

paste file1 file2 ...
paste -dlist file1 file2 ...
paste -s [-dlist] file1 file2 ...

DESCRIPTION

In the first two forms, paste concatenates corresponding lines of the given input files file1, file2, etc. It treats each file as a column or columns of a table and pastes them together horizontally (parallel merging). If you will, it is the counterpart of cat(1) which concatenates vertically, i.e., one file after the other. In the last form above, paste replaces the function of an older command with the same name by combining subsequent lines of the input file (serial merging). In all cases, lines are glued together with the tab character, or with characters from an optionally specified list. Output is to the standard output, so it can be used as the start of a pipe, or as a filter, if - is used in place of a file name.

The meanings of the options are:

-d Without this option, the new-line characters of each but the last file (or last line in case of the -s option) are replaced by a tab character. This option allows replacing the tab character by one or more alternate characters (see below).

list One or more characters immediately following -d replace
     the  default  tab  as the line concatenation character.
     The list is used circularly, i.e., when  exhausted,  it
     is  reused.   In parallel merging (i.e., no -s option),
     the lines from the last file are always terminated with
     a  new-line character, not from the list.  The list may
     contain the special escape sequences:   \n  (new-line),
     \t  (tab),  \\ (backslash), and \0 (empty string, not a
     null character).  Quoting may be necessary, if  charac-
     ters  have  special  meaning to the shell (e.g., to get
     one backslash, use "" -d"\\\\" ).

-s Merge subsequent lines rather than one from each input file. Use tab for concatenation, unless a list is specified with -d option. Regardless of the list, the very last character of the file is forced to be a newline.

- May be used in place of any file name, to read a line from the standard input. (There is no prompting).

EXAMPLES

ls | paste -d" " -

               list directory in one column

ls | paste - - - -

               list directory in four columns

paste -s -d"\t\n" file

               combine pairs of lines into lines

DIAGNOSTICS

"line too long"

Output lines are restricted to 511 characters.

"too many files"