PASTE(1)

💖 PASTE(1) — the paste girlies' manual 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to PASTE(1) from the General Commands Manual section — she's a tiny little line-gluer and honestly she ate. let's get into it ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

paste — writes lines consisting of the sequentially corresponding lines from each FILE, separated by TABs, to standard output.

like. that's literally her whole job and she's iconic for it 💅

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

paste [OPTIONS] [FILE]...

(yeah that's it. no drama. main character energy fr fr)

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Write lines consisting of the sequentially corresponding lines from each FILE, separated by TABs, to standard output.

that's the vibe. line one of file A snuggles up next to line one of file B, a lil TAB sits between them, and out they go to stdout. then line two with line two. you get it 🫶

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -s, --serial — paste one file at a time instead of in parallel. so instead of side-by-side columns, she just smooshes each file's lines into her own single line, one file at a time 💫
• -d, --delimiters <LIST> — reuse characters from LIST instead of TABs. yes you can choose your own separator, customise your girl 🔥
• -z, --zero-terminated — line delimiter is NUL, not newline. for when newlines are NOT the moment 🌙
• -h, --help — Print help. she's helpful like that 😌
• -V, --version — Print version. show her some love 💖
• [FILE] [default: -] — the files you want glued. and bestie, the default is -, so if you pass nothing she just reads stdin. no cap 💀

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🧚 VERSION 🧚

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

Join all the lines into a single line, using TAB as delimiter:

paste [-s|--serial] path/to/file

Join all the lines into a single line, using the specified delimiter:

paste [-s|--serial] [-d|--delimiters] delimiter path/to/file

Merge two files side by side, each in its column, using TAB as delimiter:

paste path/to/file1 path/to/file2

Merge two files side by side, each in its column, using the specified delimiter:

paste [-d|--delimiters] delimiter path/to/file1 path/to/file2

Merge two files, with lines added alternatively:

paste [-d|--delimiters] '\n' path/to/file1 path/to/file2

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.

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and that's the whole thing, bestie 🥰 this page is dated 2026-09-25 and comes from the General Commands Manual family, section PASTE(1) — she's giving uutils coreutils v0.12.0 energy and honestly? slay. go forth and paste responsibly 💜🌸✨