Question

I have a small question and would appreciate your help in it please.

I need to merge different text files together using paste command as :

paste -d, ~/Desktop/*.txt  > ~/Desktop/Out/merge.txt

However, the files got merged out of order. (text files are numbered 1, 2, 3, etc.)

I am using *.txt since different number of files exist for different scenarios.

Would you mind helping me in it please.

Answer 1

Here’s a rather long way of doing the same but in one line.

paste -d, $(ls ~/Desktop/*.txt | awk -F/ '{print $NF"/"$0}' | sort -n | cut -d/ -f2-) > ~/Desktop/merge.txt

I like one liners 🙂