PASTE(1) BSD Reference Manual PASTE(1)NAMEpaste - merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files
SYNOPSISpaste [-s] [-d list] file ...
DESCRIPTION
The paste utility concatenates the corresponding lines of the given input
files, 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 input files still
contain data, the file is treated as if it were an endless source of emp-
ty lines.
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 charac-
ters in list are used circularly, i.e., when list is exhaust-
ed 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 dis-
played, 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 ex-
cept the last line in each input file is replaced with the
tab character, unless otherwise specified by the -d option.
If `-' is specified for one or more of the input files, the standard in-
put is used; standard input is read one line at a time, circularly, for
each instance of `-'.
The paste utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
SEE ALSOcut(1)STANDARDS
The paste utility is expected to be IEEE Std1003.2 (``POSIX'') compati-
ble.
BSDI BSD/OS June 6, 1993 1
