PAIR-AT-A-TIME(1)

💖 PAIR-AT-A-TIME(1) 💖

okay bestie, so this is pair-at-a-time, a lil cutie from the NCBI Entrez Direct User's Manual and she is so much simpler than she sounds, i promise 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

pair-at-a-time — parse an input file into alphanumeric word pairs 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pair-at-a-time

no flags. no args. no options. nothing. she takes zero of your nonsense 💅 (your input comes in through stdin, bestie, see below)

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so here's the whole vibe 🌸

pair-at-a-time reads a text file from standard input, and then she does her lil four-step routine:

1. she extracts all sequences of digits and English letters 🔍
2. she lowercases any capital letters (yes, ALL of them, she does not care how important they thought they were 😭)
3. she prints all pairs of distinct adjacent terms in input order
4. one pair per line. that's it. that's the whole job 👑

and literally that's the entire man page, she's a short queen, we love a low-maintenance icon ⭐

ngl the "distinct" part is doing a lot of work there — adjacent terms that match each other don't get paired up, so don't come for her when duplicates don't show 💀

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

her friends!! go say hi 🦋

• accn-at-a-time(1)
• filter-stop-words(1)
• join-into-groups-of(1)
• word-at-a-time(1)
• xsearch(1)

NCBI · 2025-05-26 — mwah, that's the version and the date, thanks for coming to my ted talk, go pair some words bestie 💖✨🎀🦋🌸💅🫶