How to append contents of multiple files into one file

Question

I want to copy the contents of five files to one file as is  I tried doing it using cp for each file  But that overwrites the contents copied from the previous file  I also tried   paste -d   n  1 txt 0 txt   and it did not work   I want my script to add the newline at the end of each text file   eg  Files 1 txt  2 txt  3 txt  Put contents of 1 2 3 in 0 txt  How do I do it

User · Answer

for i in  1  3   do cat  quot  i txt quot   gt  gt  0 txt  done  I found this page because I needed to join 952 files together into one   I found this to work much better if you have many files   This will do a loop for however many numbers you need and cat each one using  gt  gt  to append onto the end of 0 txt  Edit  as brought up in the comments  cat  1  3  txt  gt  gt  0 txt  or cat  0  3  txt  gt  gt  all txt

User · Answer

You need the cat  short for concatenate  command  with shell redirection   gt   into your output file   cat 1 txt 2 txt 3 txt  gt  0 txt

User · Answer

if you have a certain output type then do something like this  cat  path to files   txt  gt  gt  finalout txt

User · Answer

If all your files are in single directory you can simply do  cat    gt  0 txt  Files 1 txt 2 txt     will go into 0 txt

User · Answer

Another option  for those of you who still stumble upon this post like I did  is to use find -exec   find   -type f -name    txt  -exec cat       gt  gt  output file   In my case  I needed a more robust option that would look through multiple subdirectories so I chose to use find  Breaking it down   find     Look within the current working directory   -type f   Only interested in files  not directories  etc   -name    txt    Whittle down the result set by name  -exec cat        Execute the cat command for each result      means only 1 instance of cat is spawned  thx  gniourf gniourf     gt  gt  output file   As explained in other answers  append the cat-ed contents to the end of an output file

User · Answer

If you want to append contents of 3 files into one file  then the following command will be a good choice   cat file1 file2 file3   tee -a file4  gt   dev null   It will combine the contents of all files into file4  throwing console output to  dev null

User · Answer

if your files contain headers and you want remove them in the output file  you can use   for f in  ls   txt   do sed  2   d   f  gt  gt  0 out  done

User · Answer

Another option is sed   sed r 1 txt 2 txt 3 txt  gt  merge txt    Or      sed h 1 txt 2 txt 3 txt  gt  merge txt    Or     sed -n p 1 txt 2 txt 3 txt  gt  merge txt   -n is mandatory here   Or without redirection       sed wmerge txt 1 txt 2 txt 3 txt   Note that last line write also merge txt  not wmerge txt    You can use w merge txt  to avoid confusion with the file name  and -n for silent output    Of course  you can also shorten the file list with wildcards  For instance  in case of numbered files as in the above examples  you can specify the range with braces in this way   sed -n w merge txt   1  3  txt

User · Answer

All of the  text-  files into one find     xargs cat  gt  outfile  xargs makes the output-lines of find    the arguments of cat  find has many options  like -name    txt  or -type  you should check them out if you want to use it in your pipeline

User · Answer

If all your files are named similarly you could simply do   cat   log  gt  gt  output log

User · Answer

If the original file contains non-printable characters  they will be lost when using the cat command   Using  cat -v   the non-printables will be converted to visible character strings  but the output file would still not contain the actual non-printables characters in the original file   With a small number of files  an alternative might be to open the first file in an editor  e g  vim  that handles non-printing characters   Then maneuver to the bottom of the file and enter   r second file name    That will pull in the second file  including non-printing characters   The same could  be done for additional files   When all files have been read in  enter   w    The end result is that the first file will now contain what it did originally  plus the content of the files that were read in

[linux] How to append contents of multiple files into one file

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