How to interleave lines from two text files

linux unix command
Frank picture Frank · Oct 25, 2010 · Viewed 24.3k times · Source

What's the easiest/quickest way to interleave the lines of two (or more) text files? Example:

File 1:

line1.1
line1.2
line1.3

File 2:

line2.1
line2.2
line2.3

Interleaved:

line1.1
line2.1
line1.2
line2.2
line1.3
line2.3

Sure it's easy to write a little Perl script that opens them both and does the task. But I was wondering if it's possible to get away with fewer code, maybe a one-liner using Unix tools?

Answer

codaddict picture codaddict · Oct 25, 2010 
paste -d '\n' file1 file2

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