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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers grep multiple text files in folder into 1 text file? Post 26775 by Perderabo on Friday 23rd of August 2002 08:06:16 AM
Old 08-23-2002
Quote:
Originally posted by oombera
Wow - I tried
(ls * | xargs cat) > all

It works the same and it's cool that it's so small.. but I keep getting the error:

cat: input/output files 'all' identical

The large file is created like it should be, but is there something additional to get rid of / suppress this error?
Ouch! First, that line has the same problem that your original solution did, we are asking the shell to replace * with a list of all files in the current directory. And that won't fly with 5,300 files. What I meant to type is:

(ls | xargs cat) > all

I also didn't think about the output file popping into existence before the ls ran. The best solution for that is something like:

(ls | xargs cat) > /some/dir/all

cat is smart enough to catch this, but grep isn't. And I'm still thinking that the op wanted to use grep to extract certain lines.
 

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CAT(1)							      General Commands Manual							    CAT(1)

NAME
cat, read, nobs - catenate files SYNOPSIS
cat [ file ... ] read [ -m ] [ -n nline ] [ file ... ] nobs [ file ... ] DESCRIPTION
Cat reads each file in sequence and writes it on the standard output. Thus cat file prints a file and cat file1 file2 >file3 concatenates the first two files and places the result on the third. If no file is given, cat reads from the standard input. Output is buffered in blocks matching the input. Read copies to standard output exactly one line from the named file, default standard input. It is useful in interactive rc(1) scripts. The -m flag causes it to continue reading and writing multiple lines until end of file; -n causes it to read no more than nline lines. Read always executes a single write for each line of input, which can be helpful when preparing input to programs that expect line-at-a- time data. It never reads any more data from the input than it prints to the output. Nobs copies the named files to standard output except that it removes all backspace characters and the characters that precede them. It is useful to use as $PAGER with the Unix version of man(1) when run inside a win (see acme(1)) window. SOURCE
/src/cmd/cat.c /src/cmd/read.c /bin/nobs SEE ALSO
cp(1) DIAGNOSTICS
Read exits with status eof on end of file or, in the -n case, if it doesn't read nlines lines. BUGS
Beware of and which destroy input files before reading them. CAT(1)
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