NAME
rlam - laminate records from multiple files
SYNOPSIS
rlam [ -tS ][ -u ][ -iaN | -ifN | -idN | -iiN | -iwN | -ibN ] input1
input2 ..
DESCRIPTION
Rlam simply joins records (or lines) from multiple inputs, separating
them with the given string (TAB by default). Different separators may
be given for different files by specifying additional -t options in
between each file name. Note that there is no space between this
option and its argument. If none of the input files uses an ASCII
separator, then no end-of-line character will be printed, either.
An input is either a stream or a command. Commands are given in
quotes, and begin with an exclamantion point (’!’). If the inputs do
not have the same number of lines, then shorter files will stop
contributing to the output as they run out.
The -ia option may be used to specify ASCII input (the default), or the
-if option may be used to indicated binary IEEE 32-bit floats on input.
Similarly, the -id and -ii options may be used to indicate binary
64-bit doubles or integer words, respectively. The -iw option
specifies 2-byte short words, and the -ib option specifies bytes. If a
number is immediately follows any of these options, then it indicates
that multiple such values are expected for each record. For example,
-if3 indicates three floats per input record for the next named input.
In the case of the -ia option, no number indicates one line per input
record, and numbers greater than zero indicate that many characters
exactly per record. For binary input formts, no number implies one
value per record. For anything other than EOL-separated input, the
default tab separator is reset to the empty string.
A hyphen (’-’) by itself can be used to indicate the standard input,
and may appear multiple times. The -u option forces output after each
record (i.e., one run through inputs).
EXAMPLE
To join files output1 and output2, separated by a comma:
rlam -t, output1 output2
To join a file with line numbers (starting at 0) and its reverse:
cnt ‘wc -l < lam.c‘ | rlam - -t: lam.c -t ’!tail -r lam.c’
To join four data files, each having three doubles per record:
rlam -id3 file1.dbl file2.dbl file3.dbl file4.dbl > combined.dbl
AUTHOR
Greg Ward
SEE ALSO
cnt(1), histo(1), neaten(1), rcalc(1), tabfunc(1), total(1)