Paste (Unix)

paste is a Unix command line utility which is used to join files horizontally (parallel merging) by outputting lines consisting of the sequentially corresponding lines of each file specified, separated by tabs, to the standard output. It is effectively the horizontal equivalent to the utility cat command which operates on the vertical plane of two or more files.

The paste utility is invoked with the following syntax:

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.

The paste utility accepts the following options:

-d delimiters, 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.

For the following examples, assume that names.txt is a plain-text file that contains the following information:

and that numbers.txt is another plain-text file that contains the following information:

The following example shows the invocation of paste with names.txt and numbers.txt as well as the resulting output:

When invoked with the -s option, the output of paste is adjusted such that the information is presented in a horizontal fashion:

Finally, the use of the -d option (delimiters) is illustrated in the following example:

As an example usage of both, the paste command can be used to concatenate multiple consecutive lines into a single row:

...
Wikipedia