Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,
I want to merge multiple files (under hundreds folders) side by side. File name are the same but folder are different.
like

Code:

 
folder1/same_name.txt
folder2/same_name.txt
folder3/same_name.txt
......

Normally it can be done as

Code:

paste /different_path*/same_name.txt > merged_file.txt

but my challenge is I want to only merge the first 50 lines of each file as

Code:

head -50 folder1/same_name.txt | sort 
head -50 folder2/same_name.txt | sort 
...
head -50 folder299/same_name.txt | sort

to create intermediate files, then merge the intermediate files to have the result. I'd like to combine looping thru the folders with paste such as:

Code:

paste `head file*.txt | sort`
or
paste $(head file*.txt | sort)

Of course this did not work. My question is how to pipe the multiple "head | sort" with paste to have single line command.
Thanks a lot!

If your system "normally" handles the command line length generated by that pathname expansion, then there's no reason you can't use it for this task.

Code:

paste /different_path*/same_name.txt | head -n50 | sort > merged_file.txt

Regards,
Alister

Thanks alister!
What I meant is to head -50 | sort each file first then do paste to merge them as

Code:

paste (head -50 | sort /different_path*/same.txt) > merged_file.txt.

But the bracket part can not be piped like that.