Append file text after last word in Unix

Question

I want to append file text after last word of another file on a UNIX system.

File 1

& program executed successfully

File 2

Hello
World
This is a sample output 

I want to copy the first two words and paste them after the last word of file 2.

Expected output:

File3

Hello
World
This is a sample output & program

File2 has a newline character at the end, so when I tried using cat, it prints on a new line instead of printing after the last word on the same line. Please suggest a solution using UNIX commands and the bash shell.

Answer 1

You can select the first 2 words of every line of file2 with:

$ cut -d' ' -f1-2 file1 
& program

So you can then use that to do something like this:

$ printf '%s %s\n' "$(cat file2)" "$(cut -d' ' -f1-2 file1)" > file3
$ cat file3
Hello
World
This is a sample output & program

If your file can have more than one line, and you just want the first one, pass it through head:

printf '%s %s\n' "$(cat file2)" "$(cut -d' ' -f1-2 file1 | head -n1)"

Answer 2

I think that terdon's answer is good if you know that the second file is short. If you don't know that it is short, or you know that it is a long enough file to want to avoid reading it into a command substitution, then you may choose to avoid expanding more than the last line of the file in a substitution like that:

{
    sed '$d' file2
    printf '%s %s\n' "$( tail -n 1 file2 )" "$( cut -d ' ' -f -2 file1 )"
} >file3

This first uses sed to output all but the last line from file2, and then we use a modified variant of terdon's code to output the last line of file2 together with the first two space-delimited words from file1.

Answer 3

You could use a little ed program:

ed -s file2 << \EOF
$r !cut -d " " -f1,2 file1
-1,.j
w file3
EOF

Or, as a one-liner:

printf '%s\n' '$r !cut -d " " -f1,2 file1' '-1,.j' 'w file3' | ed -s file2

Answer 4

Just a funky alternative with head, tail, cut and paste:

{ head -n -1 file2; ( tail -n 1 file2; cut -d ' ' -f -2 file1) | paste -sd ' ' ;} > file3

Or if head doesn't have the -1 alternative on your system, it can be replaced with sed '$d' file2

Answer 5

With awk:

awk 'NR==FNR { append=$1 OFS $2; next }
prev!=""{ print prev } { prev=$0 }
END{ print prev, append }' file1 file2

with saving current line into a temporary variable prev we delay outputting the lines by one so at the END when we processed all the lines, we append a text from file1 to the last line of the file2.

Answer 6

#!/usr/bin/python
f1=open('file1','r')
ext=" ".join(f1.readline().strip().split(' ')[0:2])
f2=open('file2','r')
k=f2.readlines()
k[-1]="{0} {1}".format(k[-1].strip(),ext)
for i in k:
    print i.strip()



output

Hello
World
This is a sample output & program