Shell Programming and Scripting

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
#Awk program : paste.awk

function readFile(i,    rec) {
   if (getline rec < ARGV[i])
      return rec;
   else {
      ++eof[i];
      return "";
   }
}

BEGIN {
   while (1) {
      rec1 = readFile(1);
      rec2 = readFile(2);
      if (eof[1] && eof[2]) break;
      printf("%-60s%s\n", rec1, rec2);
   }
   exit;
}

$ awk -f paste.awk file1.txt file2.txt
apples                                                      red
grapes                                                      green
oranges                                                     orange
lemons                                                      yellow
$

paste file1 file2 | awk -F '\t' '{printf "%-60s%s\n", $1, $2}'