How to merge two text files into one file without using cat or sed

Question

I have two files

File1:

a
b
c

File2:

1
2
3

now I need to combine them to one csv file

a;1
b;2
c;3

As the files are really huge, I would rather not use cat and sed to process the second file. (For smaller files I can use a script). Any Idea ? awk/perl ?

Nitpick - CSV is *Comma* Separated Values. I suspect many CSV utilities would reject semicolon separated values, at least with default settings. — Digital Trauma, May 10 '16 at 20:24
@DigitalTrauma many utilities which are aware of locale will take semicolon separated values for certain locales, and reject the comma separated ones. — rumtscho, May 10 '16 at 22:39
@DigitalTrauma [According to Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values), "CSV" is commonly used to refer to files with values separated by other delimiters too. It's quite confusing. — Anko - inactive in protest, May 11 '16 at 11:21

Rahul · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-03T11:14:01.983

42

Try paste command :

paste -d';' File1 File2 > File3

edited Jun 03 '16 at 11:14

answered May 10 '16 at 08:55

Rahul

13,309
3
43
54

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 10 '16 at 23:10

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
{
  w[FNR][FILENAME] = $0
}
END {
  for (x in w)
    print w[x][ARGV[1]] ";" w[x][ARGV[2]]
}

I also came up with this, but it fails because of the way Awk iterates arrays:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
{
  w[FNR][FILENAME] = $0
}
END {
  for (x in w) {
    y = 0
    for (z in w[x]) {
      printf w[x][z]
      printf y ? "\n" : ";"
      y = 1
    }
  }
}

How to merge two text files into one file without using cat or sed

2 Answers2