Question

I have this script which reads lines from two files and outputs them in order of:

The first line of file1
the first line of file2
the second line of file1
the second line of file2
etc

How do I do this without using the external paste command in the script ?

paste -d'\n' file1 file2 | while read line1 && read line2;
do
#echo "$line1 $line2" 
echo "$line1" 
echo "$line2" 
done

Answer 1

Thanks for that article Kerrek …. have updated my code which works fine now :

exec 5< file1
exec 6< file2
while read line1 <&5 && read line2 <&6
do
echo  "$line1"
echo "$line2"
done