Today I want to share a nifty tool that I just discovered the other day while looking for a method to combine data from two different files.  The data in the two files were related one-to-one by row. Thus, the first line in file 1 was related to the first line in file 2, and so on.

To the rescue is the linux paste command.  This command takes two filenames as arguments and outputs their corresponding rows side by side.

Example:

paste lotto_nums.txt dates.txt

Check it out.  Hopefully it’s as useful to you as it was for me.