Reading multiple files at once?

[erixire]

Hi,

Is it possible in Awk to read multiple files at once so that awk return the concatenation of every first line, second line, third line, etc? For example, suppose file "File01" contains:
1
2
3
4

file "File02" contains:

Dog
Cat
Bird
Snake

Then, I want to ouptut
1 Dog
2 Cat
3 Bird
4 Snake

Can this be done? If not, does anybody knows another tool that can do such a trick?

Thanks

 

[marsd]

It is ugly and fairly hard to do in awk.

function num_elems(arra, i,x) {
for (i in arra) {
x++
}
return x
}

BEGIN {

while ((getline < &quot;file1&quot > 0) {
array[a++] = $1
}
close(&quot;file1&quot

while ((getline < &quot;file2&quot > 0) {
arraytwo[m++] = $2
}
close(&quot;file2&quot

num1 = num_elems(array)
num2 = num_elems(arraytwo)

while (x <= num1 && x <= num2) {
++x
printf &quot;%s\t%s\n&quot;, array[x],arraytwo[x]
}
}

You have issues like:
What happens if one array is large than the other?
You can just truncate the number of elements read:
num1 = (num1 > num2) ? num2 : num1
What if you want to use ascii or descriptive subscripts?

Paste can probably do what you want.

 

[Murugs]

Try &quot;paste&quot; command in UNIX.
I was in need of such a script and paste did the work perfectly. Go to man paste for more details.

Regards
MP