Concatenating multiple text files into a single file in Bash

Question

What is the quickest and most pragmatic way to combine all   txt file in a directory into one large text file   Currently I m using windows with cygwin so I have access to BASH   Windows shell command would be nice too but I doubt there is one

User · Answer

The most upvoted answers will fail if the file list is too long  A more portable solution would be using fd fd -e txt -d 1 -X awk 1  gt  combined txt  -d 1 limits the search to the current directory  If you omit this option then it will recursively find all  txt files from the current directory  -X  otherwise known as --exec-batch  executes a command  awk 1 in this case  for all the search results at once

User · Answer

type  source folder     File extension   gt   destination folder   file name   File extension    For Example   type C    txt  gt  C  1 all txt   That will Take all the txt files in the C   Folder and save it in C  1 Folder by the name of all txt  Or  type  source folder     gt   destination folder   file name   File extension    For Example   type C     gt  C  1 all txt   That will take all the files that are present in the folder and put there Content in C  1 all txt

User · Answer

the most pragmatic way with the shell is the cat command  other ways include   awk  1    txt  gt  all txt perl -ne  print     txt  gt  all txt

User · Answer

Just remember  for all the solutions given so far  the shell decides the order in which the files are concatenated  For Bash  IIRC  that s alphabetical order  If the order is important  you should either name the files appropriately  01file txt  02file txt  etc     or specify each file in the order you want it concatenated     cat file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 file6  gt  out txt

User · Answer

When you run into a problem where it cats all txt into all txt  You can try check all txt is existing or not  if exists  remove   Like this     -e   all txt     amp  amp  rm   all txt

User · Answer

Be careful  because none of these methods work with a large number of files  Personally  I used this line   for i in   ls   grep   txt   do cat  i  gt  gt  output txt done   EDIT  As someone said in the comments  you can replace   ls   grep   txt   with   ls   txt   EDIT  thanks to  gnourf gnourf expertise  the use of glob is the correct way to iterate over files in a directory  Consequently  blasphemous expressions like   ls   grep   txt   must be replaced by   txt  see the article here    Good Solution  for i in   txt do cat  i  gt  gt  output txt done

User · Answer

all of that is nasty      ls   grep   txt   while read file  do cat  file  gt  gt    output txt  done    easy stuff

User · Answer

You can use Windows shell copy to concatenate files   C   gt  copy   txt outputfile   From the help      To append files  specify a single file for destination  but multiple files for source  using wildcards or file1 file2 file3 format

User · Answer

How about this approach    find   -type f -name    txt  -exec cat       gt  gt  output txt

User · Answer

The Windows shell command type can do this   type   txt  gt outputfile   Type type command also writes file names to stderr  which are not captured by the  gt  redirect operator  but will show up on the console

User · Answer

You can do like this  cat  directory path        h m   gt  test txt  if you use    to include the extension of the files you want to find  there is a sequencing problem

User · Answer

This appends the output to all txt  cat   txt  gt  gt  all txt   This overwrites all txt  cat   txt  gt  all txt

[bash] Concatenating multiple text files into a single file in Bash

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