Join consequent lines in unix

Friday, December 28, 2012 awk , perl , sed , unix 1 Comments

I have a file like this.

John
30
Mike
0.0786268
Tyson
0.114889
Gabriel
0.176072
Fiona
0.101895

I need to shift every second row to a new column so it should look like this

John   30
Mike   0.0786268
Tyson  0.114889
Gabriel 0.176072
Fiona   0.101895

There can be many solutions for this:
sed:

sed 'N;s/\n/ /g' yourfile

Awk:

awk '{if(NR%2!=0){p=""}else{p="\n"};printf $0" "p}' your_file

Paste:

paste - - file new_file

My pick is:

xargs -n2