You never said that any of the code that I had previously suggested worked for any of your data sets. You only said that there was a problem because the number of lines in files 6 through 10 only had two lines instead of three.

One possible solution would be to add empty rows to all of the files that have fewer rows than the longest file. If you did that as a first step, all of the existing scripts might do what you wanted. And, if you knew that files 6 - 10 would always contain one line less than the other files, it would be very easy to add an empty line to those four or five files without making the other processing any more complex.

Assuming that you will always have at least one file that is named orgdigits.xls where digits is a single digit and at least one file where digits is two digits and that you will never have any files where digits is more than two digits, one could try:

Code:

awk -v OFS='\t' '
FNR == 1 {
	file_cnt++
}
{	data[file_cnt, 1, FNR] = $1
	data[file_cnt, 2, FNR] = $5
	if(FNR > line_cnt)
		line_cnt = FNR
}
END {	for(i = 1; i <= line_cnt; i++)
		for(j = 1; j <= file_cnt; j++)
			printf("%s%s%s%s",  data[j, 1, i], OFS, data[j, 2, i],
			    (j == file_cnt) ? ORS : OFS)
}
' org?.xls org??.xls > concats.xls

but I am disappointed that you were unwilling to make any attempt to solve this new wrinkle on your own.

With the other suggestions in post #22, I assume that you would be able to modify the last line of this code to handle any number of input files.