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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant to begin every video with "blah is my favorite command." I watched the video for 'paste' first and I thought it wonderful that someone else also thinks paste is their favorite.

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This is my favorite observation.

I like using paste to convert a list of lines into a single line, comma-delimited list...

Contrived example, for brevity:

    awk 'BEGIN { while (i < 10) print i++ }' | paste -sd, -

or maybe:

    ls *txt | paste -sd, -

Fwiw you can do that with just awk, no pipe and paste required

I like using paste to sum over numbers where each number is in a distinct line. E.g.:

     printf "1\n2\n3" | paste -sd+ | bc
    6

I suppose you could do that more cleanly with awk, but this has worked whenever I needed it. I find it easier to type.

I'd just do that with tr '\n' ,

It's fascinating that there are so many different ways to do things, even within the limited confines of coreutils!

    seq 10 | paste -sd, -

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