Shell Programming and Scripting

I have done some changing files around and it seems that the paste command is only pulling from the second input file. What would cause it to do this? I changed the files around and if the lat was fist and lon was second pulled data from the lon and vice versa.

don't know.

try this in the middle of the script.

create file a -- put some junk in there.
create file b -- put some junk in there.

run the command:

paste -d' ' a b > c

exactly like that right before or after your paste command in your script.

if c contains something -- then paste is working as advertised.
If THAT doesn't work.... we'll go to C. By coincidence, I rewrote the
paste command on my system because I wanted something similar
to the output of the Visual SourceSafe diff command.

OK ... so i made 1.txt file containing
1
2
3
4....
and I made 2.txt file containing
a
b
c
d...
and after using the paste command i got

1 a
2 b
3 c
4 d
5 e
6 f
7 g
8 h
9 i

So it works. For some reason it is killing the first file. Now I just found out that if i do not use the deliminator I get this

[77225 loc]$ paste temp113-lat.txt temp113-lon.txt
2645.0805105.471900
2644.5485105.626300
2643.7325104.146495
2643.7325104.146495
2643.7325104.146495
2644.9895103.428400
2645.7915103.305700

lat lon
2647.358 | 5103.446300

It has some digits missing from the lat file it should be XXXX.XXXXXX but all of the digits are in the lon file. I wonder what is causing this to happen? Why would it not want to read the first file with a deliminator? I think it is a conspiracy.

Hi, can I just jump in here
as a noob i'd not heard of the paste command, and was quite interested in what it could do. I tried the command as suggested

#paste -d' 'filea fileb > filec and got the same results as the OP, in that only details from the second file were being picked up.

however with a quick blurt at the man page i tried again, with some spaces that were not originally apparent from the suggested post

dave@freya:~$ paste -d ' ' 113_lat.txt 113_lon.txt > latlon.txt
dave@freya:~$ cat latlon.txt
2644.989500 5104.146495
2645.791200 5103.428400
2647.358600 5103.305700
2647.358300 5103.446300
2647.338700 5103.442100
2647.307900 5103.538900
2647.312100 5103.875200
2647.240400 5104.080100
2647.000300 5105.286800
2646.618800 5105.493300
2646.472100 5105.901000
2646.358800 5106.284000

note the spaces between the -d the ' symbols and the first filename
(run on opensolaris and bash shell if that helps)

Anyhoo thanks for an interesting little tip

OK... I am back to work... The last post talking about spaces... I tried but I am still getting the same result... Do spaces matter that much... I know whitespace makes a difference but there has to be a reason why it is not pulling from the second file using the delimiter.

Code:

paste -d" " file1 file2

Hi, which quotes are you using (single, double, back)?, what shell are you using? and what O/S are you using?

I'll include output below from a test run without spaces, and with spaces, running on Solaris 10 using a Bash shell

-bash-3.00$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 dhoward other 144 Feb 4 07:27 temp113-lat.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 dhoward other 144 Feb 4 07:28 temp113-lon.txt
-bash-3.00$
-bash-3.00$ paste -d''temp113-lat.txt temp113-lon.txt > 113latlon.txt
-bash-3.00$ cat 113latlon.txt
5104.146495
5103.428400
5103.305700
5103.446300
5103.442100
5103.538900
5103.875200
5104.080100
5105.286800
5105.493300
5105.901000
5106.284000
-bash-3.00$ paste -d ' ' temp113-lat.txt temp113-lon.txt > 113latlon2.txt
-bash-3.00$ cat 113latlon2.txt
2644.989500 5104.146495
2645.791200 5103.428400
2647.358600 5103.305700
2647.358300 5103.446300
2647.338700 5103.442100
2647.307900 5103.538900
2647.312100 5103.875200
2647.240400 5104.080100
2647.000300 5105.286800
2646.618800 5105.493300
2646.472100 5105.901000
2646.358800 5106.284000
-bash-3.00$

As you can see the spaces do matter, as does the type of quotes, in the above examles i have used the single quotes('), in the following examples, I am using the backquotes (`) and the double quotes (").

-bash-3.00$ paste -d ` ` temp113-lat.txt temp113-lon.txt > 113latlon3.txt
-bash-3.00$ cat 113latlon3.txt
5104.146495
5103.428400
5103.305700
5103.446300
5103.442100
5103.538900
5103.875200
5104.080100
5105.286800
5105.493300
5105.901000
5106.284000

-bash-3.00$ paste -d " " temp113-lat.txt temp113-lon.txt > 113latlon4.txt
-bash-3.00$ cat 113latlon4.txt
2644.989500 5104.146495
2645.791200 5103.428400
2647.358600 5103.305700
2647.358300 5103.446300
2647.338700 5103.442100
2647.307900 5103.538900
2647.312100 5103.875200
2647.240400 5104.080100
2647.000300 5105.286800
2646.618800 5105.493300
2646.472100 5105.901000
2646.358800 5106.284000
-bash-3.00$


The backquotes return only one set of values. from the second file