Paste (Unix program)

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.

=Usage=

The paste utility is invoked with the following syntax:

paste [ options ] [ file1 ..]

=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.

=Options=

The paste utility accepts the following options:

-d delimators , which specifies a list of delimators to be used instead of tabs for separating consecutive values on a single line. Each delimator is used in turn; when the list has been exhausted, paste begins again at the first delimator.

-s, which causes paste to append the data in serial rather than in parallel; that is, in a horizontal rather than vertical fashion.

=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

=References=

PASTE(1) . FreeBSD General Commands Manual . <http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgiquery=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>

=See also=

*paste(1) *Cut (Unix)(1) *sed(1) *AWK programming language(1)