Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Merging multiple files as columns


There are different cases when we need to concatenate files by their columns. We may need each file's content to appear in separate columns. Usually, the cat command concatenates in a line (or row-wise) fashion.

How to do it...

paste is the command that can be used for column-wise concatenation. The paste command can be used with the following syntax:

$ paste file1 file2 file3 …

Let's try an example as follows:

$ cat file1.txt
1
2
3
4
5
$ cat file2.txt
slynux
gnu
bash
hack
$ paste file1.txt file2.txt
1slynux
2gnu
3bash
4hack
5

The default delimiter is tab. We can also explicitly specify the delimiter by using -d. For example:

$ paste file1.txt file2.txt -d ","
1,slynux
2,gnu
3,bash
4,hack
5,

See also

  • The Column-wise cutting of the file with cut recipe in this chapter explains how to extract data from text files