.\" Copyright (c) 1989, 1990 The Regents of the University of California.
.\" This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by
.\" Adam S. Moskowitz and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
.\" %sccs.include.redist.roff%
.\" @(#)paste.1 5.5 (Berkeley) %G%
.Nd merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files
utility concatenates the corresponding lines of the given input files,
replacing all but the last file's newline characters with a single tab
character, and writes the resulting lines to standard output.
If end-of-file is reached on an input file while other input files
still contain data, the file is treated as if it were an endless source
The options are as follows:
Use one or more of the provided characters to replace the newline
characters instead of the default tab.
are used circularly, i.e., when
is exhausted the first character from
This continues until a line from the last input file (in default operation)
or the last line in each file (using the -s option) is displayed, at which
begins selecting characters from the beginning of
The following special characters can also be used in list:
Empty string (not a null character).
Any other character preceded by a backslash is equivalent to the
Concatenate all of the lines of each separate input file in command line
The newline character of every line except the last line in each input
file is replaced with the tab character, unless otherwise specified by
If ``-'' is specified for one or more of the input files, the standard
input is used; standard input is read one line at a time, circularly,
for each instance of ``-''.
utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
function is expected to be POSIX 1003.2 compatible.