paste

This command joins two files horizontally (column wise). For example, if a file holds the list of students and the other file holds their ages, the two files can simply be joined together to get two columns: one holding names and the other holding ages.

Practice 1

Let Consider two files students and stu_age whose contents are as follows:

# cat students

Rama

Anju

Anita

Sanjana

Hema

Jeevan

Bobby

Neha

Priya

# cat stu_age

29

19

22

32

35

24

19

23

31

The following example shows the usage of the paste command

# paste students stu_age

Rama               29

Anju                19

Anita               22

Sanjana            32

Hema               35

Jeevan             24

Bobby             19

Neha                23

Priya                31

It can be seen in which when the paste command is issued, the two files combined and the output appears in two columns.