Joining files

hi,

May somebody suggest me how to join 2 or more tables in Unix side-by-side? Sometnimg like:

file1
2.45 5.65
2.54 2.45
...


file1
2.45 5.65
2.54 2.45
...


newFile
2.45 5.65 2.45 5.65
2.54 2.45 2.54 2.45
...

Number of columns in this files are variable and all have more then 10 columns. Is there an easy way to do this like to merge files with cat?


Thank you in advance
oliver

Are you allowed to use a programming language such as perl? If so, this is a trivial task to do. Let us know if you need help with this.

It's doable with a few loops in bash, but you could do with using perl really as scorpy recommended.

Your requirements are too vague. Do you only want to join lines that are identical, or start with N identical columns? What do you want to do if there are lines that don't match? Or do you want to join the lines of each file regardless of what they contains, i.e. line 1 to line 1, line 2 to line2 etc?

Take a look at the 'join' command - it may do exactly what you want. Or it may not, its hard to tell from your description. Other possible commands are 'paste' and 'comm'.

Dave