linux - Display two files side by side

Question

How can 2 unsorted text files of different lengths be display side by side (in columns) in a shell

Given one.txt and two.txt:

$ cat one.txt
apple
pear
longer line than the last two
last line

$ cat two.txt
The quick brown fox..
foo
bar 
linux

skipped a line

Display:

apple                               The quick brown fox..
pear                                foo
longer line than the last two       bar 
last line                           linux

                                    skipped a line

paste one.txt two.txt almost does the trick but doesn't align the columns nicely as it just prints one tab between column 1 and 2. I know how to this with emacs and vim but want the output displayed to stdout for piping ect.

The solution I came up with uses sdiff and then pipes to sed to remove the output sdiff adds.

sdiff one.txt two.txt | sed -r 's/[<>|]//;s/(){3}//'

I could create a function and stick it in my .bashrc but surely a command for this exists already (or a cleaner solution potentially)?

Answer 1

You can use pr to do this, using the -m flag to merge the files, one per column, and -t to omit headers, eg.

pr -m -t one.txt two.txt

outputs:

apple                               The quick brown fox..
pear                                foo
longer line than the last two       bar
last line                           linux

                                    skipped a line

See Also:

• Print command result side by side
• Combine text files column-wise