Linux Admin - paste Command

The paste command is used to merge lines of files. Following are the commonly used switches.

The best example to clearly understand the -s switch is see it −

[root@centosLocal Documents]# cat myOS.txt && cat lines.txt
Linux 
Windows 
Solaris 
OS X 
BSD 
line 1 
line 2 
line 3 
line 4 
line 5 
[root@centosLocal Documents]# past myOS.txt lines.txt

[root@centosLocal Documents]# paste myOS.txt lines.txt 
Linux   line 1 
Windows line 2 
Solaris line 3 
OS X    line 4 
BSD line 5

[root@centosLocal Documents]# paste -s myOS.txt lines.txt 
Linux   Windows Solaris OS X    BSD 
line 1  line 2  line 3  line 4  line 5 
[root@centosLocal Documents]#

So, if we wanted a ":" colon or Tab separated file by combining two different files, the paste command makes this fairly simple −

[root@centosLocal Documents]# paste -d":"  myOS.txt lines.txt 
Linux:line 1 
Windows:line 2 
Solaris:line 3 
OS X:line 4 
BSD:line 5

[root@centosLocal Documents]# paste -d"\\t"  myOS.txt lines.txt 
Linux   line 1 
Windows line 2 
Solaris line 3 
OS X    line 4 
BSD line 5
[root@centosLocal Documents]#

With paste it's pretty easy to take a file, and make it into Tab separated columns −

[root@centosLocal Documents]# paste -d"\t" - - < lines.txt  
line 1  line 2 
line 3  line 4 
line 5   
[root@centosLocal Documents]#