paste

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 of every line except the line from the last input file shall be replaced with a . 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 files on which end-of-file was detected, unless the -s option is specified. The delimiter shall be reset to the first element of list after each file operand is processed. The 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. Concatenate all of the lines from each input file into one line of output per file, in command line order. The of every line except the last line in each input file shall be replaced with a , unless otherwise specified by the -d option. If an input file is empty, the output line corresponding to that file shall consist of only a character. The standard input shall be used only if one or more file operands is '-'. See the INPUT FILES section. The input files shall be text files, except that line lengths shall be unlimited. Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See XBD Internationalization Variables the precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale categories.) If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables. Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments and input files). Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error. [XSI) ] ![[Option Start]]( Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC MESSAGES. ![[Option End]]( 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. Conforming applications should only use the specific -escaped delimiters presented in this volume of POSIX.1-2017. 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: creates file1 (a text file) with lines no longer than 500 bytes (plus the ) and file2 that contains the remainder of the data from file . Note that file2 is not a text file if there are lines in file that are longer than 500 + {LINE MAX} bytes. The original file can be recreated from file1 and file2 using the command: are not necessarily equivalent; the latter is not specified by this volume of POSIX.1-2017 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: The normative text is reworded to avoid use of the term "must" for application requirements.