Question

I have three files with each one containing one row with two columns as follows:

file1.txt

3    5

file2.txt

2    6

file3.txt

6    3

I want to combine them in a single file that sums the first columns and the seconds columns each as follows:

finalfile.txt

11    14

I need to do that with Unix commands

Answer 1

Assuming the Python tag was a mistake, this will do the trick.

echo `cat file*.txt` | awk 'BEGIN {a=0;b=0;} {for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) { if ( i%2 == 0 ) { b+=$i } else { a+=$i } } } END { print a, b }'

The echo `…` puts all the numbers on a single line. The awk program sums the odd and even columns in variables a and b.