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Merges given files line by line

Terminal - Merges given files line by line
paste -d ',:' file1 file2 file3
2009-06-17 00:11:04
User: thebodzio
Functions: paste
7
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Merges given files line by line

In the above example all files have 4 lines. In "file1" consecutive lines are: "num, 1, 2, 3", in "file2": "name, Jack, Jim, Frank" and in "file3": "scores, 1300, 1100, 980". This one liner can save considerate ammount of time when you're trying to process serious portions of data. "-d" option allows one to set series of characters to be used as separators between data originating from given files.

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 3 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

That's a handy dandy command. :-)

It is also possible to do a two file merge using sdiff

and a little "data transforming" with sed/awk.

Comment by mpb 205 weeks ago

True, true? :)

Could you prepare awk alternative? It would be very nice to have one here.

Comment by thebodzio 202 weeks and 4 days ago

does anybody know how to merge stdout lines? e.g. say I want to make my new version of ls that shows file and permissions (like a shorted ls -l). It would look something like this:

ls -l |cut -c1-10 >/tmp/file1; ls -1 >/tmp/file2; paste /tmp/file{1,2}

It's not just for the above example, but other stuff I have swirling in my mind.

Comment by Buzzcp 181 weeks and 3 days ago

How about using

stat -c "%A %n" *

in this particular case? ?stat? is more powerful than that.

Comment by thebodzio 181 weeks and 3 days ago

One more thing about "paste". It can take "-" instead of file name. This makes "paste" to read lines from stdin. Nice thing here is that you can use more that one "-"s. For example if you've got file:

author Shakespeare title Hamlet

You can do

cat file | paste - -

to transform it into

author Shakespeare title Hamlet
Comment by thebodzio 181 weeks and 3 days ago

Your point of view

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