write a two column file from two files using awk

Question

I have two files of one column each

1
2
3

and

4
5
6

I want to write a unique file with both elements as

1 4
2 5
3 6

It should be really simple I think with awk.

Answer 1

You could try paste -d ' ' <file1> <file2>. (Without -d ' ' the delimiter would be tab.)

Answer 2

paste works okay for the example given but it doesn't handle variable length lines very well. A nice little-know core-util pr provides a more flexible solution:

$ pr -mtw 4 file1 file2
1 4
2 5
3 6 

A variable length example:

$ pr -mtw 22 file1 file2
10         4
200        5
300,000,00 6

---

And since you asked about awk here is one way:

$ awk '{a[FNR]=a[FNR]$0" "}END{for(i=1;i<=length(a);i++)print a[i]}' file1 file2
1 4 
2 5 
3 6