Display two files side by side
How can 2 unsorted text files of different lengths be display side by side (in columns) in a shell
Given one.txt and two.txt:
$ cat one.txt
apple
pear
longer line than the last two
last line
$ cat two.txt
The quick brown fox..
foo
bar
linux
skipped a line
Display:
apple The quick brown fox..
pear foo
longer line than the last two bar
last line linux
skipped a line
paste one.txt two.txt almost does the trick but doesn't align the columns nicely as it just prints one tab between column 1 and 2. I know how to this with emacs and vim but want the output displayed to stdout for piping ect.
The solution I came up with uses sdiff and then pipes to sed to remove the output sdiff adds.
sdiff one.txt two.txt | sed -r 's/[<>|]//;s/(\t){3}//'
I could create a function and stick it in my .bashrc but surely a command for this exists already (or a cleaner solution potentially)?
Answer
You can use pr to do this, using the -m flag to merge the files, one per column, and -t to omit headers, eg.
pr -m -t one.txt two.txt
outputs:
apple The quick brown fox..
pear foo
longer line than the last two bar
last line linux
skipped a line