Adding a Column of values in a tab delimited file

You can use a one-liner loop like this:

for f in file1 file2 file3; do sed -i "s/$/\t$f/" $f; done

For each file in the list, this will use sed to append to the end of each line a tab and the filename.

Explanation:

Using the -i flag with sed to perform a replacement in-place, overwriting the file
Perform a substitution with s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/. In this example PATTERN is $, the end of the line, and REPLACEMENT is \t (= a TAB), and $f is the filename, from the loop variable. The s/// command is within double-quotes so that the shell can expand variables.

Come on why you guys recommend those powerful tools when there's paste command!

$ cat a
A
B
C
D
$ cat b
1
2
3
4
$ paste a b
A   1
B   2
C   3
D   4

With a little trickery, you could use paste for the OP's purpose. However, it will not replace the files inplace:

for f in file1 file2 file3; do 
    paste $f <(yes $f | head -n $(cat $f | wc -l)) > $f.new
done

This will paste the respective filename as the last column of each file into new file filename.new

You can use awk:

awk '{print $0, FILENAME}' file1 file2 file3 ...

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