paste

paste is a shell command that joins files horizontally (parallel merging) by writing to standard output lines consisting of the sequentially corresponding lines of each input file, separated by tabs.

• GNU Coreutils Project Homepage [EN]

• GNU Coreutils [EN] @ Fedora Package
• GNU Coreutils [EN] @ Homebrew Formula

• paste [EN] @ Wikipedia

Documentation

• paste [EN] @ GNU Coreutils Manual

• man 1 'paste'
  • BSD [EN]
  • GNU [EN]

Syntax

paste [PARAMETER ...] [FILE ...]

Parameters

General

The following parameters can be used with all version of paste:

NOTE:

The BSD version only supports the short form (e.g. -d) of these parameters!

-d LIST, --delimiters=LIST

Consecutively use the characters in LIST instead of TAB to separate merged lines. When LIST is exhausted, start again at its beginning.

-s, --serial

Paste the lines of one file at a time rather than one line from each file.

GNU

The following parameters can be used with the GNU version of paste:

-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).

Examples

Sort a comma separated string ignoring the first char

sed 's/\n//g; s/, */\n/g' <<<'.foo, #bar, -bla' \
| sort --key='1.2' \
| paste --delimiters=',' --serial

Output:

#bar,-bla,.foo