On Tue, 16 Feb 2021, Will Senn wrote:

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...

I use "cut" a fair bit, rarely use "paste", but as for "join" and RDBs, just look at the man page: "join — relational database operator".  As for future use, who knows?  Could be a fun project for someone with time on their hands (not me!).

-- Dave, who once implemented a "join" operation with BDB