add lines from a file to the end of another file with sed

[p014k]

Hello,

I have two files;

file1;
1/
2/
3/
4/

file2;
a
b
c
d

I want to use sed to append the contents of file2 to file1 line-by-line, so that the end result looks like this;

1/a
2/b
3/c
4/d

how do I do this? I've tried sed '$r file2' file1, but that just appends it at the end of the file, rather than line-by-line.

[meton_magis]

I was interested in your problem, so I created a script to do what you're looking to do.

file1Count=`wc -l $1 | awk '{print $1}'`
file2Count=`wc -l $2 | awk '{print $1}'`

if (($file1Count >= $file2Count))
  then
    lineCount=${file1Count}
  else
    lineCount=${file2Count}
fi

i=1
done
while ((${i} <= ${lineCount}))
do
  echo `sed -n ${i}p $1; sed -n ${i}p $2` | sed 's/\n//'
  let i++
done

create a file named "something.sh" dump this code in there, and run `chmod 755 something.sh` then run `./something.sh file1 file2`

it will do what you want. I'm sure there are much better ways to get it done, but I'm lazy, and this works.

If you've done any programming before you should be able to read it without issues, but the key thing is the
echo `sed -n ${i}p file1; sed -n ${i}p file2` | sed 's/\n //g'
line. all it does is print 1 line from each file, and remove the newline that is added automatically. Then loop, and do it again, until every line in the 2 files are run through.

this should work, though you really should read Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide if you're going to be doing any real amount scripting.