hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0962.txt

Episode: 962
Title: HPR0962: LiTS 004: paste
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0962/hpr0962.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:40:17

---

Welcome to Linux in the Shell, episode 4, the paste command.
My name is Dan Washco, and I will be your host, and up front I want to thank Hacker Public
Radio for supporting my efforts in the show, and I hope you enjoy it, but I also hope
that you go over and visit the website and read the entry for episode 4 of the paste command,
either before listening to this audio or soon afterwards to solidify the paste command
in your mind.
Paste command is a very simple command, and what it does is it takes one or more files
and pastes the line, each of the lines of those files together, consecutively.
So for instance, you can have two text files, let's say the first text file has A on
one line, B on another line, C on a third line, and D on a fourth line, and then the second
text file has numbers.
One on one, the first line, two on the second line, three on the third line, a four on
the fourth line.
So if you were to specify paste, file one, file two, you would get the output would show
A, tab one, the next line would be B, tab two, and then C, tab three, four, tab D. Well,
D, tab four, sorry, it makes that up.
So essentially what it does is it takes those two files and pastes each line of those files
together consecutively.
Now you can specify more than two files, you can paste as many files together as you want.
So let's make it easier on my tongue and say file one has numbers, file two has letters,
and file three has flowers, and we'll say daisy, tulip, violet, sunflower.
So if we were to paste all three of those files together, you would get one tab, A, tab,
daisy, two tab, B, tab, tulip, three tab, C, tab, violet, and four tab, D, tab, sunflower.
Very simple.
You can specify a delimiter instead of the tab which is a default by passing the option
dash dash delimiters, and that's plural equals and then delimiter in double quotes.
So for instance, if I were to do the same thing I just said, paste dash dash delimiters
equal open double quote, comma, close double quote, and then file one, two, three, what
I would get would be instead of tab separating them, commas.
So I would get one comma, A, comma, tulip, two comma, B, comma, violet, and so on.
Now understand that delimiters, if you specify just one, that's the one that's going to use.
As you can specify a delimiter, a list of delimiters to go between each input or file.
So for instance, in the case I just said, I could have passed as delimiters, comma, and
then equal sign, really odd thing, but what would happen is I would get, when I pasted
those together, paste dash dash delimiters equal open double quote, comma, equal sign, closed
double quote, file one, two, and three, I would get one comma, A equals tulip, two comma,
B equals, daisy, whatever the flower was, not can't remember what the flowers are, but
you get the picture.
It specifies it uses the delimiters that you specify in order.
Now if it just so happens that you specified a third delimiter in this case, say a question
mark, what happened then is it would just ignore that third delimiter and not use it.
So you would just get the comma and the equal sign being used, and it would just ignore
that third delimiter unless you add it on a fourth file.
Now there's one other option that the paste command takes, and that's the dash s option,
and that's to serialize what you wrote or what's being pasted together.
So instead of the output being the file, line one, pasted with line two right next to
it, it would kind of turn it on its head and represent that instead of it being vertical,
it would be horizontal.
So line one would be the entire file, but each line would be rep on a horizontal line,
would be the horizontal line.
So if I were to pass the dash s with the delimiters of comma delimiters to the paste using file
one, two, and three, what I would get on line one is the numbers one, two, three, four,
all separated by commas.
And then on line two, I would get a comma b, comma c, comma d.
And then on line three, I would get the flowers, daisy comma, tulip comma, violet comma,
sunflower.
So it would kind of an odd way of doing it, but that's what it does serialize it.
Instead of representing it in columnar format, it represents it out in rows, horizontally.
Each line is, you know, each line of that one file is on the same line.
And then underneath it is the next line of there.
So kind of flips it and reverses it on his head.
The last thing I want to say about the paste command is that it's supposed to passing
all files, you can pass standard in by representing it with a dash.
So instead of a file name, if you have a dash in there as one of the places of a file,
it's going to allow you to accept input from standard in now.
That would be an example would be to echo or cat another file or something, something
that has output in the format that you're looking for, it's going to produce lines.
And pipe that into the paste command, or if you don't have something, a command or action
piping something into the paste command is going to accept standard in from the keyboard.
And you could do that yourself, you would type paste text file one, which is the numbers,
and then dash, and it's going to present you with a prompt waiting for you to enter something.
So then it would echo back out that line and doing it that way, you can see how it works,
but it's really not too practical or useful.
So that's basically the paste command, very simple command, paste files, or together
line by line, you can specify a delimiter or a chain of delimiters, make sure they're
in double quotes by default that you use this tab, or you can specify a bunch of files
and standard in and place it one of those files.
I thank you for listening, again, check out the website so you can get a read up on this
and probably get a better picture of how the serial works, that's something more visual
than representing it verbally.
And also gives you the opportunity to check out the video that corresponds with this entry,
so you can see it in action.
My name is Dan Walshko, I thank you, see you in two weeks, and I really thank Hacker
Public Radio.
Have a great day.
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