Merging two files, one column at a time

I have 2 large files (3000 columns, 15000 rows) of the following format

file1 (tab-separated):

1/0 0/0 0/0
0/0 1/1 0/0
1/1 0/1 0/0

file2 (tab-separated):

3 5 2
1 7 10
3 4 3

I’d like to combine the values from the first column of each file with a “:” separator, then move on to the second, third, etc. columns.
Desired output (tab-separated):

1/0:3 0/0:5 0/0:2
0/0:1 1/1:7 0/0:10
1/1:3 0/1:4 0/0:3

Efficiency isn’t critical, so any language is fine. I apologize if this has been asked before.

Answers:

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Method 1

Something like this? Worked with your sample data:

paste  file{1,2} | awk '{for (i=1;i<=NF/2; i++){printf "%s:%st",$i,$(NF/2+i)};printf "n"}'
1/0:3   0/0:5   0/0:2
0/0:1   1/1:7   0/0:10
1/1:3   0/1:4   0/0:3

Method 2

awk '{
    getline f2 < "file2"
    split(f2, a)
    for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) 
        printf "%s:%st", $i, a[i]
    print ""
}' file1

Method 3

A slightly different approach:

paste -d: <(xargs -n1 <file1) <(xargs -n1 <file2) | xargs -n 3

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0