RLAM(1)

NAME
rlam - laminate records from multiple files

SYNOPSIS
rlam [ -tS ][ -u ][ -iaN | -ifN | -idN | -iiN | -iwN | -ibN ][ -in M ] input1 input2 ..

DESCRIPTION
Rlam simply joins records (or lines) from multiple inputs, separating them with the given string (TAB by default). Different separators may be given for different files by specifying additional -t options in between each file name. Note that there is no space between this option and its argument. If none of the input files uses an ASCII separator, then no end-of-line character will be printed, either.

An input is either a stream or a command. Commands are given in quotes, and begin with an exclamantion point ('!'). If the inputs do not have the same number of lines, then shorter files will stop contributing to the output as they run out.

The -ia option may be used to specify ASCII input (the default), or the -if option may be used to indicated binary IEEE 32-bit floats on input. Similarly, the -id and -ii options may be used to indicate binary 64-bit doubles or integer words, respectively. The -iw option specifies 2-byte short words, and the -ib option specifies bytes. If a number is immediately follows any of these options, then it indicates that multiple such values are expected for each record. For example, -if3 indicates three floats per input record for the next named input. In the case of the -ia option, no number indicates one line per input record, and numbers greater than zero indicate that many characters exactly per record. For binary input formts, no number implies one value per record. For anything other than EOL-separated input, the default tab separator is reset to the empty string.

If a -in option is given with a positive integer argument, this will be the maximum number of records that will be read or produced by rlam.

A hyphen ('-') by itself can be used to indicate the standard input, and may appear multiple times. The -u option forces output after each record (i.e., one run through inputs).

EXAMPLE
To join files output1 and output2, separated by a comma:

    rlam -t, output1 output2

To join a file with line numbers (starting at 0) and its reverse:

    cnt `wc -l < lam.c` | rlam - -t: lam.c -t '!tail -r lam.c'

To join four data files, each having three doubles per record:

    rlam -id3 file1.dbl file2.dbl file3.dbl file4.dbl > combined.dbl

AUTHOR
Greg Ward

SEE ALSO
cnt(1), histo(1), neaten(1), rcalc(1), tabfunc(1), total(1)