Paste (Unix program)
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- The correct title of this article is paste. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
The paste utility is a program found on Unix-like and otherwise POSIX-compliant operating systems. It is used to concatenate the contents of files for each corresponding line.
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[edit] Usage
The paste utility is invoked with the following syntax:
paste [options] [file1 ..]
[edit] Description
Once invoked, paste will read all its file arguments. For each corresponding line, paste will append the contents of each file at that line to its output along with a tab. When it has completed its operation for the last file, paste will output a newline character and move on to the next line.
[edit] Options
The paste utility accepts the following options:
-d delimators, which specifies a list of delimiters to be used instead of tabs for separating consecutive values on a single line. Each delimiter is used in turn; when the list has been exhausted, paste begins again at the first delimiter.
-s, which causes paste to append the data in serial rather than in parallel; that is, in a horizontal rather than vertical fashion.
[edit] Examples
For the following examples, assume that names.txt is a plain-text file that contains the following information:
Mark Smith Bobby Brown Sue Miller Jenny Igotit
and that numbers.txt is another plain-text file that contains the following information:
555-1234 555-9876 555-6743 867-5309
The following example shows the invocation of paste with names.txt and numbers.txt as well as the resulting output:
$ paste names.txt numbers.txt Mark Smith 555-1234 Bobby Brown 555-9876 Sue Miller 555-6743 Jenny Igotit 867-5309
When invoked with the -s option, the output of paste is adjusted such that the information is presented in a horizontal fashion:
$ paste -s names.txt numbers.txt Mark Smith Bobby Brown Sue Miller Jenny Igotit 555-1234 555-9876 555-6734 867-5309
Finally, the use of the -d option is illustrated in the following example:
$ paste -d ., names.txt numbers.txt Mark Smith.555-1234 Bobby Brown,555-9876 Sue Miller.555-6743 Jenny Igotit,867-5309
[edit] References
"PASTE(1)". FreeBSD General Commands Manual. <http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=paste§ion=1&format=html>
"8.2 paste: Merge lines of files". GNU text utilities: paste invocation. <http://www.gnu.org/software/textutils/manual/textutils/html_node/textutils_35.html>
