paste(1) User Commands paste(1)NAMEpaste - merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files
SYNOPSIS
/usr/bin/paste
/usr/bin/paste [-options] [file...]
ksh93
paste [-options] [file...]
DESCRIPTIONpaste concatenates the corresponding lines of a given input file and
writes the resulting lines to standard output. By default, paste
replaces the NEWLINE character of every line other than the last input
file with the TAB character.
Unless the -s option is specified, if an end-of-file is encountered on
one or more input files, but not all input files, paste behaves as if
empty lines were read from the files on which end-of-file was detected.
Unless the -s option is specified, paste is limited by the underlying
operating system on how many file operands can be specified.
If no file operands are given or if the file is -, paste reads from
standard input. The start of the file is defined as the current offset.
OPTIONS
The following options are supported:
-d list specifies a list of delimiters. These delim‐
--delimiters=list iters are used circularly instead of TAB to
replace the NEWLINE character of the input lines.
Unless the -s option is specified, the delimiter
will be reset to the first element of list each
time a line is processed from each file. The
delimiter characters corresponding to list will be
found by treating list as an ANSI-C string, except
that the \0 sequence inserts the empty string
instead of the null character.
-s Paste the lines of one file at a time rather than
--serial one line from each file. In this case if the -d
option is specified the delimiter will be reset to
the first in the list at the beginning of each
file.
--man Prints built-in manual page in either plain text,
--html HTML or nroff format.
--nroff
--help Prints basic help information.
--version Prints version information.
OPERANDS
The following operand is supported:
file A path name of an input file. If − is specified for one or more
of the files, the standard input will be used. The standard
input will be read one line at a time, circularly, for each
instance of −.
USAGE
See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of paste when
encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2^31 bytes).
EXAMPLES
Example 1 Listing a Directory in One Column
The following example lists a directory in one column:
example% ls | paste -d" " −
Example 2 Listing a Directory in Four Columns
The following example lists a directory in four columns:
example% ls | paste − − − −
Example 3 Combining Pairs of Lines from a File into Single Lines
The following example combines pairs of lines from a file into single
lines:
example% paste-s -d"\ t\ n" file
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables
that affect the execution of paste: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MES‐
SAGES, and NLSPATH.
EXIT STATUS
The following exit values are returned:
0 Successful completion.
>0 An error occurred.
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
┌─────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┐
│ ATTRIBUTE TYPE │ ATTRIBUTE VALUE │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Availability │SUNWcs │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│CSI │Enabled │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Interface Stability │Committed │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Standard │See standards(5). │
└─────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┘
SEE ALSOcut(1), grep(1), ksh93(1), pr(1), attributes(5), environ(5), large‐
file(5), standards(5)SunOS 5.11 29 Nov 2009 paste(1)
