Sue Miller 555-6743 Jenny Igotit 867-5309 When invoked with the option ( on BSD or older systems), the output of is adjusted such that the information is presented in a horizontal fashion: $ paste --serialize names.txt numbers.txt Mark Smith Bobby Brown Sue Miller Jenny Igotit 555-1234 555-9876 555-6734 867-5309 Finally, the use of the option ( on BSD or older systems) is illustrated in the following example: $ paste --delimiters . names.txt numbers.txt Mark Smith.555-1234 Bobby Brown.555-9876 Sue Miller.555-6743 Jenny Igotit.867-5309 As an example usage of both, the command can be used to concatenate multiple consecutive lines into a single row: $ paste --serialize --delimiters '\t\n' names.txt Mark Smith Bobby Brown Sue Miller Jenny Igotit See also join cut List of Unix commands lam(1), formatted paste with width and justification; not core Unix References External links Unix text processing utilities Unix SUS2008 utilities