Horizontally print file contents

To concatenate the contents of a vertical file horizontally in Unix, you can use the paste command with the -s option.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say you have a file file.txt with the following vertical content:

apple
banana
orange

You can concatenate the contents horizontally using the following command:

paste -s file.txt

This will produce the output:

apple   banana  orange

The -s option tells paste to concatenate the lines horizontally instead of vertically. By default, paste separates the columns with a tab character. If you want to use a different separator, you can specify it with the -d option followed by the separator character. For example:

paste -s -d, file.txt

This will produce the output:

apple,banana,orange

where the comma is used as the separator.

I have aliased it to hcat,

alias hcat="paste -s"