paste(1) is a POSIX standard utility, though (going back to System III), pairing with cut(1).

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/p...

The Unix join command is also useful:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_(Unix)

And I have one that unifies _both_ to `clip` so you can put the same command in both sides of the pipe, e. g. to turn a line-delimited blob on your clipboard to a space-separated one:

    clip | tr '\n' ' ' | clip

https://github.com/svieira/dotfiles/blob/a3654d6a194e3689978...

    # Use clipboard in shell pipelines
    # clip | xargs echo           # uses pbpaste
    # ps -A | grep search | clip  # uses pbcopy
    clip() {
      [ -t 0 ] && pbpaste || pbcopy
    }

Holy crap. Of course! You win! Amazing!

Simple is genius

So to check if there's anything sitting on stdin without reading it I've been using

`if read -r -t0; then` # returns true if there is data but times out instantly so it doesn't consume any

Is `[ -t 0 ]` more idiomatic? Apparently it fails on this case: function < file

`read -r -t0` is Bash-only though and not POSIX, but it will work regardless of what type of data is on stdin

[ -t 0 ] instead checks whether stdin (fd 0) is a tty.