PASTE(1)

📦
version 9.10 · 5 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

💖 NAME 💖

paste — the icon that merges lines of files ✨ like it's nothing, bestie, it literally just does that 🫶

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

paste [OPTION]... [FILE]...

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

Okay so here's the tea 🍵: paste writes lines out to standard output, and each of those lines is made of the sequentially corresponding lines from every FILE you hand it — separated by TABs 💅

And the newline of every line except the line coming from the last file? Yeah, that gets swapped out for a TAB. Not me replacing your line endings 😭

If you give it no FILE, or if a FILE is literally just -, it reads standard input. Classic.

Heads up bestie: mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too. Like, the rules apply both ways, no cap 👑

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀 (all of them, I'm not skipping a single one)

  • -d, --delimiters=LIST — reuse the characters from LIST instead of TABs 🦋 backslash escapes are supported, so you can get fancy with it ✨
  • -s, --serial — paste one file at a time instead of in parallel 🧚 and in this mode, the newline of every line except the last line in each file gets replaced with a TAB
  • -z, --zero-terminated — the line delimiter is NUL, not newline 🫧 (so do not come at me with your newline assumptions)
  • --help — display this help and exit ⭐
  • --version — output version information and exit 💜

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Written by David M. Ihnat and David MacKenzie. Legends, honestly, we stan 🫶

🐛 REPORTING BUGS 🐛

Found a bug? Not a vibe, but okay, tell the right people:

🔍 SEE ALSO 🔍

Packaged by Ubuntu (9.10-1ubuntu2) 🍓 Copyright © 2026 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. 💀

And that's the whole thing bestie, mwah 💅 this page is GNU coreutils 9.10, dated August 2026 — it's giving PASTE(1) main character energy and honestly? it ate 🌈⭐🎀

📦 where this page comes from