Horizontal file concatenation

Question

Is there a Linux command like cat that joins files with the same number of lines horizontally?

It took me a LONG time to find this question! It seems "horizontal" is the only way to find an answer to this problem. All the other "duplicates" when I searched for "concatenate columns with awk", etc., only led to database join with awk. — Josiah Yoder, Dec 07 '22 at 15:08

score 46 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 07 '13 at 15:29

46

paste may do the trick.

% cat t1 
a
b
c
c
d
f
g
% cat t2 
h
i
j
k
l
m
n
% paste t1 t2 
a       h
b       i
c       j
c       k
d       l
f       m
g       n

At least some of the time, you don't need to have a "key" to concatenate the lines.

edited Mar 07 '13 at 15:29

l0b0

answered Mar 10 '11 at 14:06

5

As seen in the example above, the default delimiter is TAB... For no delimiter: paste -d '\0' t1 t2 – Peter.O Mar 11 '11 at 00:10
will this work for files that are gigabytes in size? – SARose Apr 26 '17 at 23:30
@SARose I don't know. Give it a try and leave a comment about the results. – Apr 27 '17 at 00:15

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 10 '11 at 13:56

5

join should do the trick - You just need to prefix the lines with an identical ID.

answered Mar 10 '11 at 13:56

l0b0

2 Answers2