4 ms·

If you're just looking for a single column, then as zamfi mentioned, cut does the job: $ paste <(printf "a\nb\nc\n") <(printf "1\n2\n3\n") | cut -f2 1 2

If you're just looking for a single column, then as zamfi mentioned, cut does the job: $ paste <(printf "a\nb\nc\n") <(printf "1\n2\n3\n") | cut -f2 1 2 3 It makes sense that "cut" and "paste" would be inverse operations, but too bad that GUIs repurposed these words for clipboard operations. But awk can do both, and does so in a single pass: $ paste <(printf "a\nb\nc\n") <(printf "1\n2\n3\n") | awk '{ print $1 > "letters"; print $2 > "numbers" }' $ cat letters a b c $ cat numbers 1 2 3

sillysaurusx 5y ago
What! I didn’t know awk could do that within single quotes. The heck, it implements a subset of sh? Thanks!
- camhutch 5y ago
  awk has some basic redirection features. gawk documentation: https://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/gawk_6.html#SEC41 https://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/gawk_6.html#SEC41 posix documentation: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695299/utilities/awk.html#tag_04_06_13_10 https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695299/utilities/aw...
stewartbutler 5y ago
Kinda-sorta related, you can pipe to a multivariable loop: paste <(printf "a\nb\nc\n") <(printf "1\n2\n3\n") | while read x y; do echo "$y -- $x"; done Kinda silly for this example, but very useful in things like `kubectl` pipelines -- you can do something like this: kubectl get pods --all-namespaces | awk '{print $1 " " $2}' | grep "doesntexist" | while read x y; do kubectl delete pod $y --namespace $x --wait=false; done This lets you list all pods in a cluster, grep a selection of them by name, and delete them in a batch, regardless of which namespace they are in, while shuffling the order of args into different flags.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Most useful comment I’ve read in months, for me. Cheers!
- forty 5y ago
  Sorry, but my shellcheck OCD forces me to say "read without -r will mangle backslashes." ;)
CornCobs 5y ago
TIL you can pipe into files in awk. I've never come across this feature somehow. Is it commonly used?

sillysaurusx 5y ago

What! I didn’t know awk could do that within single quotes. The heck, it implements a subset of sh? Thanks!

camhutch 5y ago
awk has some basic redirection features. gawk documentation: https://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/gawk_6.html#SEC41 https://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/gawk_6.html#SEC41 posix documentation: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695299/utilities/awk.html#tag_04_06_13_10 https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695299/utilities/aw...

stewartbutler 5y ago

Kinda-sorta related, you can pipe to a multivariable loop: paste <(printf "a\nb\nc\n") <(printf "1\n2\n3\n") | while read x y; do echo "$y -- $x"; done Kinda silly for this example, but very useful in things like `kubectl` pipelines -- you can do something like this: kubectl get pods --all-namespaces | awk '{print $1 " " $2}' | grep "doesntexist" | while read x y; do kubectl delete pod $y --namespace $x --wait=false; done This lets you list all pods in a cluster, grep a selection of them by name, and delete them in a batch, regardless of which namespace they are in, while shuffling the order of args into different flags.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Most useful comment I’ve read in months, for me. Cheers!
forty 5y ago
Sorry, but my shellcheck OCD forces me to say "read without -r will mangle backslashes." ;)

CornCobs 5y ago

TIL you can pipe into files in awk. I've never come across this feature somehow. Is it commonly used?