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 acc

Answer 1

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 >> 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 >> output.txt;done

Answer 2

type [source folder]\*.[File extension] > [destination folder]\[file name].[File extension]

For Example:

type C:\*.txt > 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]\* > [destination folder]\[file name].[File extension]

For Example:

type C:\* > 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

Answer 3

You can do like this: cat [directory_path]/**/*.[h,m] > test.txt

if you use {} to include the extension of the files you want to find, there is a sequencing problem.

Answer 4

This appends the output to all.txt

cat *.txt >> all.txt

This overwrites all.txt

cat *.txt > all.txt

Answer 5

the most pragmatic way with the shell is the cat command. other ways include,

awk '1' *.txt > all.txt
perl -ne 'print;' *.txt > all.txt

Answer 6

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" ] && rm $"all.txt"