Often you may want to use Bash to concatenate multiple text files into a single file.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
cat *.txt > all_data.txt
This particular example concatenates all files that have a .txt extension in the current directory into a single file named all_data.txt.
It’s important to note that Bash will concatenate the files based on alphabetical name of the files by default.
However, you can type the names of the individual files in a specific order to instead concatenate them in that particular order:
cat data2.txt data3.txt data1.txt > all_data.txt
The following example shows how to concatenate multiple text files into a single file in practice.
Example: How to Concatenate Multiple Files into One File Using Bash
Suppose that our current directory has the following three text files:
- teams1.txt
- teams2.txt
- teams3.txt
Each of these text files contain the names of various basketball teams.
We can use the cat command to view the contents of each file:
Suppose that we would like to concatenate the team names from each of these files into one single file named all_teams.txt.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
cat *.txt > all_teams.txt
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this new file named all_teams.txt contains the contents from all three text files.
By default, Bash concatenates the files in the following order: teams1.txt, teams2.txt, teams3.txt.
However, we can use the following syntax to instead concatenate the files in a different order:
cat teams2.txt teams3.txt teams1.txt > all_teams.txt
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
The three text files have all been concatenated into a single file in the exact order that we specified.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: How to Find Duplicate Lines in File
Bash: How to Check if File is Empty
Bash: How to Compare Two Files
Bash: How to Check if File Contains Specific String
