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

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Do not use >; it messes up the character encoding. Use:

Get-Content files.* | Set-Content newfile.file

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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 (<3? <4?)