PASTE(CT)                XENIX System V                 PASTE(CT)



     Name
          paste - Merges lines of files.

     Syntax
          paste file1 file2 ...

          paste -dle1 file2 ...

          paste -s [-dlist] file1 file2 ...

     Description
          In the first two forms, paste concatenates corresponding
          lines of the given input files file1, file2, etc.  It treats
          each file as a column or columns of a table and pastes them
          together horizontally (parallel merging).  It is the
          counterpart of cat(C) which concatenates vertically, i.e.,
          one file after the other.  In the last form above, paste
          subsumes the function of an older command with the same name
          by combining subsequent lines of the input file (serial
          merging).  In all cases, lines are glued together with the
          tab character, or with characters from an optionally
          specified list.  Output is to the standard output, so it can
          be used as the start of a pipe, or as a filter, if - is used
          in place of a filename.

          The meanings of the options are:

          -d   Without this option, the newline characters of each but
               the last file (or last line in case of the -s option)
               are replaced by a tab character.  This option allows
               replacing the tab character by one or more alternate
               characters. (See below.)

          list One or more characters immediately following -d replace
               the default tab as the line concatenation character.
               The list is used circularly, i. e. when exhausted, it
               is reused.  In parallel merging (i. e. no -s option),
               the lines from the last file are always terminated with
               a newline character, not from the list.  The list may
               contain the special escape sequences: \n (newline), \t
               (tab), \\ (backslash), and \0 (empty string, not a null
               character).  Quoting may be necessary, if characters
               have special meaning to the shell (e.g. to get one
               backslash, use -d"\\\\" ).

          -s   Merges subsequent lines rather than one from each input
               file.  Use tab for concatenation, unless a list is
               specified with -d option.  Regardless of the list, the
               very last character of the file is forced to be a
               newline.

          -    May be used in place of any filename to read a line



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     PASTE(CT)                XENIX System V                 PASTE(CT)



               from the standard input.  (There is no prompting.)

     Examples
          ls | paste -d" " -
                         Lists directory in one column

          ls | paste - - - -
                         Lists directory in four columns

          paste -s -d"\t\n" file
                         Combines pairs of lines into lines

     See Also
          cut(CT), grep(C), pr(C)

     Diagnostics
          line too long
                    Output lines are restricted to 511 characters.

          too many files
                    Except for -s option, no more than 12 input files
                    may be specified.

































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