Add/Append a column as first column to a tab delimited file

Use paste:

paste -d"\t" file1 file2 

Where:

• -d specifies the dlimiter between the two files (\t is a tabulator).
• file1 contains the lines you want to prepend.
• file2 contains the other lines.

Edit: Another solution with awk:

awk '{getline l < "file2"; print $0"\t"l} ' file1 

Where:

• getline reads the next line from file2 into the variable called l, which is then printed after the line of file1 followed by a tab \t.

When file1 would contain:

New 201507 201507 

...and file2 contains:

A B HM 1 BN 2 

...the output would be:

New A B 201507 HM 1 201507 BN 2