India Broadband Forum

vasudha

Hi,

Yes, you read correct. This time around, we are going to paste data content of one text file into another text file and we are going to approach this issue using linux command via terminal. This one could be easily done inside X or GNOME, but let us assume we are going to do it from a linux system without X, say server or remote non-X linux box, something like that.

Let's start.

Let us view two example of text files namelyh textfile1.txt and textfile2.txt

# cat textfile1.txt
RedHat
Fedora
CentOS

# cat textfile2.txt
Enterprise Version
Core Version 9
Linux Distro


Now, let us merge or combine two text files using the linux paste command

# paste textfile1.txt textfile2.txt
result:
RedHat Enterprise Version
Fedora Core Version 9
CentOS Linux Distro


Making it permanent as file would be as easy as

# paste textfile1.txt textfile2.txt > output.txt

Did you noticed that the contents of textfile2.txt was merged with the data contents of textfile1.txt? Noticed also the fixed columnar width making the 2nd column word vertically aligned.

Merging two text file using paste could be very useful on specific scenarios of merging related data contents.

Here's another scenario.

# cat test1.txt
Citybank
Citybank
BPI Bank
Citybank

# cat test2.txt
New York, USA
San Francisco, USA
Manila, Philippines
London, UK

Again, using paste to merge contents of first file and second text file

# paste test1.txt test2.txt
result:
Citybank New York, USA
Citybank San Francisco, USA
BPI Bank Manila, Philippines
Citybank London, UK

If you want to insert a delimeter character between two columnar data or data field, that could be done using the same linux paste command like so

# paste -d", " test1.txt test2.txt
result:
Citybank,New York, USA
Citybank,San Francisco, USA
BPI Bank,Manila, Philippines
Citybank,London, UK


Neat and nice, isn't it? Hope you enjoy it, and oh, it was an old idea reminded to me by pinoyskull.

Merging two text files with a common field or column marker would be my next post, so watch out for it. And sorry for late updates, been very busy these past few weeks.

Related Posts:
Merging Linux Non-Text and Binary Files
Concatenating Multiple Linux Files
Simple Linux Text Line Formatter
Math the Beauty and Linux the Beast
Retrieve MySQL data via Bash Shell

===============================

To add text to the end of a file:

$ cat footnotes.txt >> file

If you're appending only a single line instead of multiple lines or an entire file, you can use echo instead of cat:
$ echo "192.255.255.255 bigblue" >> /etc/hosts

To append lines of text that are itemized beginning with 1, use cat's -n option; lines are preceded with the line number (offset with up to five space characters) and a tab character. Add the -b option to suppress the numbering of blank lines:
$ cat -nb > file
This line is numbered
And so is this

Another numbered line Ctrl-D

$ cat file
1 This line is numbered
2 And so is this

3 Another numbered line
$

naqviabbas

rocket science !