Using text commands to merge file content

Let's start with something simple – which is merging file content. Of course, we are only discussing text content here as merging binary files would be pointless. Our goal is to learn how to use two commands – paste and cat – to do simple things, such as concatenation and merging line by line. Let's start!

Getting ready

We just need one Ubuntu and one CentOS machine for this recipe. Here, we are going to use cli1 and cli2 to master these commands.

How to do it…

Starting with the simplest command for this chapter – cat – let's see some examples of what it does. If we type in a command such as cat filename.txt – if a file named filename.txt exists – we are going to get the content of that file on display. Let's check an example of this:

Figure 8.1 – Using the cat command on a text file

So, we used the cat command to show the...