I can’t believe I didn’t know about command-line utility until very recently. I was doing a little research on some text processing utilities and came across the “paste” command. As a Mac user I have this installed already, and this appears to be a fairly common LInux/Unix tool as well. It’s part of a suite of text processing utilities that are fairly standard. Oddly, I am very familiar with the likes of sed, grep, awk, and so on, and yet have not stumbled upon this.
Anyway, imagine the following files, starting with names.txt:
Jason Cameron Tim
And numbers.txt:
555-1234 555-9876 555-2468
Then we just run paste:
paste names.txt numbers.txt
And we get this:
Jason 555-1234 Cameron 555-9876 Tim 555-2468
Paste just marries the files up by column, reading from each file. You can supply more than two files.
I don’t have an immediate need for this utility for processing Essbase data, but it just might come in handy someday, so I’m going to keep it in my back pocket. And for you Windows users out there, well, you know the deal: get cygwin or whatever the latest and greatest Unix-on-Windows environment is.
Also a Mac user and have clients on Unix, but have only ever self-taught this stuff, so never get the benefit of a Unix mentor to say “you’re making that harder than it needs to be”. A similar example; I only found cut quite recently, had always used awk instead.
I do love how quickly I can wrangle huge data files with the Unix tools.