PASTE(1) General Commands Manual PASTE(1)

paste — merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files

paste [-s] [-d list] file ...

The paste utility shall concatenate the corresponding lines of the given input files, and write the resulting lines to standard output. The default operation of paste shall concatenate the corresponding lines of the input files. The <newline> character of every line except the line from the last input file shall be replaced with a <tab> character. If an end-of-file condition is detected on one or more input files, but not all input files, paste shall behave as though empty lines were read from the file(s) on which end-of-file was detected, unless the −s option is specified.

The paste utility shall conform to the utility argument syntax guidelines described in 2.10.2. The following options shall be supported by the implementation:

list

Unless a backslash character appears in list, each character in list is an element specifying a delimiter character. If a backslash character appears in list, the backslash character and one or more characters following it are an element specifying a delimiter character as described below. These elements specify one or more

delimiters to use, instead of the default <tab>, to replace the <newline> character of the input lines. The elements in list shall be used circularly; i.e., when the list is exhausted the first element from the list shall be re-used. When the −s option is specified:

  • The last <newline> character in a file shall not be modified.
  • The delimiter shall be reset to the first element of list after each file operand is processed. When the −s option is not specified:
  • The <newline> characters in the file specified by the last file operand shall not be modified.
  • The delimiter shall be reset to the first element of list each time a line is processed from each file. If a backslash character appears in list, it and the character following it shall be used to represent the following delimiter characters: \n <newline> character \t <tab> character \\ backslash character \0 Empty string (not a null character). If \0 is immediately followed by the character x, the character X, or any character defined by the LC_CTYPE digit keyword (see 2.5.2.1), the results are unspecified. If any other characters follow the backslash, the results are unspecified.

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 shall be replaced with the <tab> character, unless otherwise specified by the −d option.

The following operand shall be supported by the implementation:

file

A pathname of an input file. If − is specified for one or more of the files, the standard input shall be used; the standard input shall be read one line at a time, circularly, for each instance of −. Implementations shall support pasting of at least 12 file operands.

The standard input shall be used only if one or more file operands is −. See Input Files.

The input files shall be text files, except that line lengths shall be unlimited.

The following environment variables shall affect the execution of paste:

This variable shall determine the locale to use for the locale categories when both LC_ALL and the corresponding environment variable (beginning with LC_ ) do not specify a locale. See 2.6.

This variable shall determine the locale to be used to override any values for locale categories specified by the settings of LANG or any environment variables beginning with LC_.

This variable shall determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (e.g., single- versus multibyte characters in arguments and input files).

This variable shall determine the language in which messages should be written.

Default.

Concatenated lines of input files shall be separated by the <tab> character (or other characters under the control of the −d option) and terminated by a <newline> character.

Used only for diagnostic messages.

None.

None.

The paste utility shall exit with one of the following values:

Successful completion.

An error occurred.

If one or more input files cannot be opened when the −s option is not specified, a diagnostic message shall be written to standard error, but no output shall be written to standard output. If the −s option is specified, the paste utility shall provide the default behavior described in 2.11.9.

When the escape sequences of the list option-argument are used in a shell script, they must be quoted; otherwise, the shell treats the \ as a special character. Write out a directory in four columns: ls | paste - - - - Combine pairs of lines from a file into single lines: paste -s -d "\t\n" file Portable applications should only use the specific backslash escaped delimiters presented in this standard. Historical implementations treat \x, where x is not in this list, as x, but future implementations are free to expand this list to recognize other common escapes similar to those accepted by printf and other standard utilities. Most of the standard utilities work on text files. The cut utility can be used to turn files with arbitrary line lengths into a set of text files containing the same

data. The paste utility can be used to create (or recreate) files with arbitrary line lengths. For example, if file contains long lines: cut -b 1-500 -n file > file1 cut -b 501- -n file > file2 creates file1 (a text file) with lines no longer than 500 bytes (plus the <newline> character) and file2 that contains the remainder of the data from file. (Note that file2 will not be a text file if there are lines in file that are longer than 500 + bytes.) The original file can be recreated from file1 and file2 using the command: paste -d "\0" file1 file2 > file The commands

paste -d "\0" . . . paste -d "" . . .

are not necessarily equivalent; the latter is not specified by . 2 and may result in an error. The construct \0 is used to mean ‘‘no separator’’ because historical versions of paste did not follow the syntax guidelines and the command

paste -d"" . . .

could not be handled properly by ().

Because most of the standards utilities work on text files, cut and paste are required to process lines of arbitrary length as a means of converting long lines from arbitrary sources into text files and converting processed text files back into files with arbitrary line lengths to interface with those applications that require long lines as input.

September 1991 posix.fail