Tip 8: Data Manipulation in Unix

In most projects, you ultimately have some data in rows and columns in text files. How do you get it there? I assume that you are using "grep" to extract it from a file. How do you manipulate it? That is what I will show now.

There are a couple VERY useful unix commands: paste and cut.

paste allows you to append files horizontally, line-by-line. Suppose you have file1:

1
2
3
4

and file2:

2
4
6
8
10
12
14

and you run

paste file1 file2

It will output:

1	2
2	4
3	6
4	8
5	10 
	12
	14