How do I concatenate two text files in PowerShell

Question

I am trying to replicate the functionality of the cat command in Unix   I would like to avoid solutions where I explicitly read both files into variables  concatenate the variables together  and then write out the concatenated variable

User · Answer

I think the  powershell way  could be     set-content destination log -value  get-content c  FileToAppend   log

User · Answer

You can do something like   get-content input file1  gt  output file get-content input file2  gt  gt  output file   Where  gt  is an alias for  out-file   and    is an alias for  out-file -append

User · Answer

If you need to order the files by specific parameter  e g  date time    gci   log   sort LastWriteTime        Get-Content        Set-Content result log

User · Answer

To keep encoding and line endings   Get-Content files   -Raw   Set-Content newfile file -NoNewline   Note  AFAIR  whose parameters aren t supported by old Powershells   lt 3   lt 4

User · Answer

I used   Get-Content c  FileToAppend   log   Out-File -FilePath C  DestinationFile log  -Encoding ASCII -Append   This appended fine  I added the ASCII encoding to remove the nul characters Notepad   was showing without the explicit encoding

User · Answer

In cmd  you can do this   copy one txt two txt three txt four txt   In PowerShell this would be   cmd  c copy one txt two txt three txt four txt   While the PowerShell way would be to use gc  the above will be pretty fast  especially for large files  And it can be used on on non-ASCII files too using the  B switch

User · Answer

To concat files in command prompt it would be  type file1 txt file2 txt file3 txt  gt  files txt   PowerShell converts the type command to Get-Content  which means you will get an error when using the type command in PowerShell because the Get-Content command requires a comma separating the files  The same command in PowerShell would be  Get-Content file1 txt file2 txt file3 txt   Set-Content files txt

User · Answer

Simply use the Get-Content and Set-Content cmdlets  Get-Content inputFile1 txt  inputFile2 txt   Set-Content joinedFile txt  You can concatenate more than two files with this style  too  If the source files are named similarly  you can use wildcards  Get-Content inputFile  txt   Set-Content joinedFile txt  Note 1  PowerShell 5 and older versions allowed this to be done more concisely using the aliases cat and sc for Get-Content and Set-Content respectively  However  these aliases are problematic because cat is a system command in  nix systems  and sc is a system command in Windows systems - therefore using them is not recommended  and in fact sc is no longer even defined as of PowerShell Core  v7   The PowerShell team recommends against using aliases in general  Note 2  Be careful with wildcards - if you try to output to examples txt  or similar that matches the pattern   PowerShell will get into an infinite loop   I just tested this   Note 3  Outputting to a file with  gt  does not preserve character encoding  This is why using Set-Content is recommended

User · Answer

You could use the Add-Content cmdlet  Maybe it is a little faster than the other solutions  because I don t retrieve the content of the first file   gc   file2 txt  Add-Content -Path   file1 txt

User · Answer

Since most of the other replies often get the formatting wrong  due to the piping   the safest thing to do is as follows   add-content  YourMasterFile -value  get-content  SomeAdditionalFile    I know you wanted to avoid reading the content of  SomeAdditionalFile into a variable  but in order to save for example your newline formatting i do not think there is proper way to do it without   A workaround would be to loop through your  SomeAdditionalFile line by line and piping that into your  YourMasterFile  However this is overly resource intensive

User · Answer

Do not use  gt   it messes up the character encoding  Use   Get-Content files     Set-Content newfile file

[powershell] How do I concatenate two text files in PowerShell?

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