Gnu/coreutils/paste-invocation
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8.2 paste
: Merge lines of files
paste
writes to standard output lines consisting of sequentially
corresponding lines of each given file, separated by a TAB character.
Standard input is used for a file name of ‘-
’ or if no input files
are given.
Synopsis:
paste [option]… [file]…
For example, with:
$ cat num2 1 2 $ cat let3 a b c
Take lines sequentially from each file:
$ paste num2 let3 1 a 2 b c
Duplicate lines from a file:
$ paste num2 let3 num2 1 a 1 2 b 2 c
Intermix lines from stdin:
$ paste - let3 - < num2 1 a 2 b c
Join consecutive lines with a space:
$ seq 4 | paste -d ' ' - - 1 2 3 4
The program accepts the following options. Also see Common options.
- ‘
-s
’
‘--serial
’ Paste the lines of one file at a time rather than one line from each file. Using the above example data:
$ paste -s num2 let3 1 2 a b c
- ‘
-d delim-list
’
‘--delimiters=delim-list
’ Consecutively use the characters in
delim-list
instead of TAB to separate merged lines. Whendelim-list
is exhausted, start again at its beginning. Using the above example data:$ paste -d '%_' num2 let3 num2 1%a_1 2%b_2 %c_
- ‘
-z
’
‘--zero-terminated
’ Delimit items with a zero byte rather than a newline (ASCII LF). I.e., treat input as items separated by ASCII NUL and terminate output items with ASCII NUL. This option can be useful in conjunction with ‘
perl -0
’ or ‘find -print0
’ and ‘xargs -0
’ which do the same in order to reliably handle arbitrary file names (even those containing blanks or other special characters).
An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.
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