All,

I'm tooling along during our newfangled rolling blackouts and frigid temperatures (in Texas!) and reading some good old unix books. I keep coming across the commands cut and paste and join and suchlike. I use cut all the time for stuff like:

ls -l | tr -s ' '| cut -f1,4,9 -d \
...
-rw-r--r-- staff main.rs

and

who | grep wsenn | cut -c 1-8,10-17
wsenn   console
wsenn   ttys000

but that's just cuz it's convenient and useful.

To my knowledge, I've never used paste or join outside of initially coming across them. But, they seem to 'fit' with cut. My question for y'all is, was there a subset of related utilities that these were part of that served some common purpose? On a related note, join seems like part of an aborted (aka never fully realized) attempt at a text based rdb to me...

What say you?

Will