NAME
paste - merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files

SYNOPSIS
paste [ -s ][ -d list ] file ...

DESCRIPTION
The paste 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 of empty lines.

The options are as follows:

-s Concatenate all of the lines of each separate input file in
command line order. The newline character of every line
except the last line in each input file is replaced with the
tab character, unless otherwise specified by the -d option.

-d list
Use one or more of the provided characters to replace the
newline characters instead of the default tab. The characters
in list are used circularly, i.e., when list is exhausted the
first character from list is reused. 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 time paste begins selecting characters from the
beginning of list again.

The following special characters can also be used in list:

newline character

tab character

\ backslash character

Empty string (not a null character).

Any other character preceded by a backslash is equivalent to
the character itself.

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 "-".

The paste utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

SEE ALSO
cut(1)

STANDARDS
The paste function is expected to be POSIX 1003.2 compatible.