Shell Programming and Scripting

I have about 100s of files of type text in a known directory. I want to merge all files side by side. Number of lines in all the files will remain same.

For example file1 contains
cat
dog

File 2 contains
rat
mat

Output file should be
cat rat
dog mat

Using awk I was able to merge two files. But in the above mention method I want to merge 100s of files.

Thanks,
kantharaj.

what about this one:

Code:

for i in {1..100}
do
    for f in a.txt b.txt
    do
        printf "%s" `head -$i $f|tail -1`
    done
    echo ""    
done

Where variable i loops through the lines one by one

Would 'paste' be helpful?

not sure how paste would work with hundreds of files, but it will take a regular expression... i.e.

paste doc?.txt > combined.txt

will take all files doc?.txt files and paste them into combined.txt

just give a try to

Code:

paste doc*.txt >combined.txt

and see if you get what you need

paste takes wild card file names, I have just tried.

Code:

paste [abc].txt >combined.txt