UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

There you are - DOS line terminators (<CR> = \r = ^M = 0x0D). Those cause the combined lines to wrap back to the left margin for every column. The idiosyncratic output seen in post #3 comes from the <TAB> following the <CR> shifting all consecutive output to the first <TAB> position, overwriting files 2 till n-1, and leaving the final filen column. For a proof, try with longer column elements, or with a different paste delimiter (-d option).


Remove the <CR> chars with e.g. the dos2unix command, or sed 's/\o015//'.

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