UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello everyone,

This is Rameshreddy. I like this forum and its nice to share everyone's experience here and one can learn a lot from here. Appreciate the moderators especially.

Coming to my question i have 2 files and i want to paste them with specific number of tabs as delimiters (say 2 or 3 ). i know paste lets us use one delimter so i can get one TAB but how can we get more TABS?

One way i can think of is prepare a seperate temp file which contains just TAB character in each line and we can use

paste -d"\t" FILE1 TMP_FILE FILE2

Any other way to acheive this ?

Thanks in advance

The default delimiter of Paste is tab.
In order to put in more tabs, simply replace one tab by more than one tab.

U can use sed or perl to do it.

Hi C2B2

I know paste default delimeter is TAB but it will only put one char as delimeter between files even though you give multiple TABS, meaning

paste -d"\t" FILE1 FILE2 will have same result as
paste -d"\t\t..\t" FILE1 FILE2

so i hope my question is clear now and i am looking for paste solution.

I meant use Sed or perl to replace that Single tab by Multiple tabs.

Do let me kno if it dosnt wrk.

I dont think sed will work because data in FILE can contain TABS, if we replace TABS, original data will also get replaced.

I got the answer , anyway Thanks

yes "" |head -`wc -l FILE_1 | awk '{print $1}'` | paste FILE_1 - FILE_2

This will add two tabs and if you want 3 tabs you can do

yes "" |head -`wc -l FILE_1 | awk '{print $1}'` | paste FILE_1 - - FILE_2

assumption is file_1 and file_2 of same length here