How to use cut and paste together in one go

Question

I am trying to use cut and paste in the same command line but somehow it does not work. I have two files, fileA and fileB.

fileA
a b
c d


fileB
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8

I would like to cut the second and third column of fileB. I do this by the following command.

cut -f 2-3 fileB

Then in front of this, I would like to paste columns from fileA

paste fileA | cut -f 2-3 fileB > myNewFile

So myNewFile will look like

a b 2 3
c d 6 7

I can do this in two lines.

cut -f 2-3 fileB > part1
paste fileA part1 > myNewFile

But instead, i would like to do this in one go. Something similar to

paste fileA | cut -f 2-3 fileB > myNewFile

which does not work. It only prints the cut commands and do not do anything about the paste. How can i make this work in one command?

Thanks.

Solution 1

Solution 1:

paste fileA <(cut -f 2-3 fileB) > myNewFile

Solution 2:

paste fileA fileB | cut -f1-2,4-5

Solution 2

Sounds like you probably want the join or paste commands.

An example using paste to join ALL columns, then some column manipulation commands to filter the desired columns, taken from http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showthread.php?t=16618 is shown below:

$ cat foo
x1 y1
a1 b1
c1 d1
e1 f1

$ cat goo
x2 y2
a2 b2
c2 d2
e2 f2

$ paste foo goo
x1 y1   x2 y2
a1 b1   a2 b2
c1 d1   c2 d2
e1 f1   e2 f2

$ paste foo goo | column -t
x1  y1  x2  y2
a1  b1  a2  b2
c1  d1  c2  d2
e1  f1  e2  f2

$ paste foo goo | column -t | colrm 9 12
x1  y1  y2
a1  b1  b2
c1  d1  d2
e1  f1  f2

Comments

[agc]

Given echo -e "a b\nc d" > fileA ; echo -e "1 2 3 4\n5 6 7 8" > fileB, specifying delimiters works better: paste -d ' ' file[AB] | cut -d ' ' -f 1,2,4,5