Paste files with extended delimiter in bash

Question

Good day people!

Today, I was wondering how to paste several files with this delimiter: ,,.

When I use like:

paste -d',,' ...

The output only introduce one ,

I need double comma for better handling csv files, Thanks in advance for any clue

Answer 1

If you can identify a character which is not used in the file, you can do this in two steps.

paste -d '~' file1 file2 | sed 's/~/,,/'

Obviously, if the tilde already exists in your data, use a different delimiter. A control character could be a fairly safe bet, at the expense of being slightly pesky to manipulate. (In Bash, you can use e.g. $'\001' to produce a ctrl-A, etc.)

Answer 2

This works:

paste -d, file1 /dev/null file2

The documentation says:

If end-of-file is reached on an input file while other input files still contain data, the file is treated as if it were an endless source of empty lines.

Since /dev/null returns EOF immediately, it will simply be an endless source of blank lines. These will be inserted as an empty field between the contents of the two real files.