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Using sed to merge multiple csv files

I have 3 csv files that I would like to combine. Each file has 3 comma-separated columns.

File 1 has columns a,b,c File 2 has columns d,e,f File 3 has columns g,h,i

I would like to combine 3 files into one file:

 a,b,c,e,f,h

Can I use sed for this?

I could write a console application or script quite easily, but am I trying to get some sed skills and think this should be a suitable task?

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3 answers

Or just cut and paste:

 paste -d ',' file[123] | cut -d ',' -f 1,2,3,5,6,8
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You can do:

 paste file[123] | sed 's/\t/,/g' | cut -d',' -f 1,2,3,5,6,8
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Mat Mendel’s answer is good if you didn’t end up on Windows using cygwin, in which case some annoying line endings come into play. This applies to unix command-line utilities, in which case we paste and cut using \ n as the end-of-line character instead of the \ r \ n that Windows requires.

I couldn’t easily figure out how to change the end of the line character for these utils or cygwin in general, so I was happy to be able to use sed in the end.

 paste -d ',' file1 file2 file3 | sed 's/\r//g' | cut -d ',' -f 1,2,3,5,6,8 | sed 's/$/\r/'
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