Recursively Cat All the Files into Single File

Recursively cat all the files into single file

find data/ -name '*.json' -exec cat {} \; > uber.json

a short explanation:

find <where> \
  -name <file_name_pattern> \
  -exec <run_cmd_on_every_hit> {} \; \
    > <where_to_store>

Recursive cat with file names

Of course! Instead of just cating the file, you just chain actions to print the filename, cat the file, then add a line feed:

find . -name 'foo.txt' \
  -print \
  -exec cat {} \; \
  -printf "\n"

How to read each file in a folder using cat (recursively) and store it in a file?

Instead of using cat use cp it's more efficient.

find . -name \*.pdf -exec cp {} $(basename {}).txt \;

Concatenate all files recursively, ignoring one file extension

find . -type f -not -name "*.XYZ" -exec cat {} \; > /tmp/alldata.txt

More recent versions of gnu find include -not which negates the next argument. In this case, you can combine that with the -name argument to get what you want without invoking grep -v.

Cat several files into one file with the file name before the data

Using awk

awk 'FNR==1{sub(/[.][^.]*$/, "", FILENAME); print FILENAME} 1' file*.log >all.log

FNR is the file record number. It is one at the beginning of each file. Thus, the test FNR==1 tells us if we are at the beginning of a file. If we are, then we remove the extension from the filename using sub(/[.][^.]*$/, "", FILENAME) and then we print it.

The final 1 in the program is awk's cryptic way of saying print-this-line.

The redirection >all.log saves all the output in file all.log.

Using shell

for f in file*.log; do echo "${f%.*}"; cat "$f"; done >all.log

Or:

for f in file*.log
do 
    echo "${f%.*}"
    cat "$f"
done >all.log

In shell, for f in file*.log; do starts a loop over all files matching the glob file*.log. The statement echo "${f%.*}" prints the file name minus the extension. ${f%.*} is an example of suffix removal. cat "$f" prints the contents of the file. done >all.log terminates the loop and saves all the output in all.log.

This loop will work correctly even if file names contain spaces, tabs, newlines, or other difficult characters.

Cat files into a new files in multiple sub directories

Using a Bash for-Loop, this should work:

for sub_dir in $(find ./ -type d -not -name '.'); do
    cat $sub_dir/*.txt > $sub_dir/all.txt;
done

Use all the subdirs found by find (excluding the . directory) and issue a cat on each one of them.

Save all files content from a directory and sub directory into a single file with Windows cmd/Powershell

Use Get-ChildItem to recursively discover any files in the folder hierarchy, then pipe those to Get-Content (for reading) and finally pipe the output from those calls to Set-Content (for writing the whole thing back to disk).

Get-ChildItem path\to\root\folder -Recurse -File |Get-Content |Set-Content path\to\save.txt

Note: Unlike cat, Get-Content reads the files as text/strings by default, so this will work well for text-encoded files (like js, php and html source files), but won't work on binary files

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