paste is a Unix command line utility which is used to join files horizontally (parallel merging) by outputting lines consisting of the sequentially corresponding lines of each file specified, separated by tabs, to the standard output. History The version of paste bundled in GNU coreutils was written by David M. Ihnat and David MacKenzie. The command is available as a separate package for Microsoft Windows as part of the UnxUtils collection of native Win32 ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities. Usage The utility is invoked with the following syntax: paste [options] [file1 ..] Description Once invoked, will read all its arguments. For each corresponding line, will append the contents of each file at that line to its output along with a tab. When it has completed its operation for the last file, will output a newline character and move on to the next line. exits after all streams return end of file. The number of lines in the output stream will equal the number of lines in the input file with the largest number of lines. Missing values are represented by empty strings. Though potentially useful, an option to have paste emit an alternate string for a missing field (such as "NA") is not standard. A sequence of empty records at the bottom of a column of the output stream may or may not have been present in the input file corresponding to that column as explicit empty records, unless you know the input file supplied all rows explicitly (e.g. in the canonical case where all input files all do indeed have the same number of lines). Options The utility accepts the following options: -d|--delimiters delimiters, which specifies a list of delimiters to be used instead of tabs for separating consecutive values on a single line. Each delimiter is used in turn; when the list has been exhausted, begins again at the first delimiter. -s|--serial, which causes to append the data in serial rather than in parallel; that is, in a horizontal rather than vertical fashion. Examples For the following examples, assume that is a plain-text file that contains the following information: Mark Smith Bobby Brown Sue Miller Jenny Igotit and that is another plain-text file that contains the following information: 555-1234 555-9876 555-6743 867-5309 The following example shows the invocation of with and as well as the resulting output: $ paste names.txt numbers.txt Mark Smith 555-1234 Bobby Brown 555-9876