NAME

paste — merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The paste utility concatenates the corresponding lines of the given file, replacing all but the last file's newline characters with a single tab character, and writes the resulting lines to standard output. If end-of-file is reached on an input file while other file still contain data, the file is treated as if it were an endless source of empty lines.

If no file is passed, standard input is read instead.

OPTIONS

The options are as follows:

-d list

Use one or more of the provided characters to replace the newline characters instead of the default tab. The characters in list are used circularly, i.e., when list is exhausted the first character from list is reused. This continues until a line from the last input file (in default operation) or the last line in each file (using the -s option) is displayed, at which time paste begins selecting characters from the beginning of list again.

The following special characters can also be used in list:

\n

newline character

\t

tab character

\\

backslash character

\0

Empty string (not a null character).

Any other character preceded by a backslash is equivalent to the character itself.

-s

Concatenate all of the lines of each separate input file in command line order. The newline character of every line except the last line in each input file is replaced with the tab character, unless otherwise specified by the -d option.

-z

Delimiter is NULL not newline.

If ‘-’ is passed to one or more file argument, the standard input is used; standard input is read one line at a time, circularly, for each instance of ‘-’.

EXIT STATUS

The paste utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

List the files in the current directory in three columns:

Combine pairs of lines from a file into single lines:

Number the lines in a file, similar to nl(1):

Create a colon-separated list of directories named bin, suitable for use in the PATH environment variable:

SEE ALSO

cut(1)

STANDARDS

paste should be compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2024 (“POSIX.1”) specification.

Usage with no file passed and the -z option are extensions.

HISTORY

A paste command first appeared in AT&T System III UNIX and has been available since 4.3BSD-Reno.

AUTHORS

The original Bell Labs version was written by Gottfried W. R. Luderer and the BSD version by Adam S. Moskowitz and Marciano Pitargue.