Thanks for the suggestion so far. Turns out the file I'll be working with is a huge file with 1 mil rows that I need to add 20 more columns to the end of each row. The columns to be added are all the same info. I tried experimenting with the paste command with a small file of 10 rows and it did exactly what I wanted. It appended the 10 columns to the end of each row of the first file and I thought I was smart. So I figured, okay, easiest way to add 20 more columns to this large file is to create a file with 1 mil rows of the additional columns to match the original file and then do the paste oldfile newfile > bigfile but when I couldn't duplicate the lines so easily and had to hit yy, it got to be annoying so I kind of wish I had been better at awk or something. If I want to avoid the yank case because there's no easy way to do it easily, then I may have to try criglerj solution huh?

Thanks, everyone.