UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm trying to concatenate all .doc files within a directory and its subdirectories using the textutil . So basically I have the same question as in this thread, but it is already closed so that's why I'm creating a new one. In that ocasion, the suggested solution was using

Code:

find ./foo -maxdepth <number> -type f -name <filename_pattern> -exec cat \{} \;

In my case, I'm trying the following line:

Code:

]find . -maxdepth 3 -type f -name *.doc -exec cat \{} \;

However, I can't make it work. Any suggestions appreciated.

Moderator's Comments:

edit by bakunin: added the link you provided. If you need anything, just ask - we are here to help you.

I would wrap the *.doc in double quotes and see if that helps.

Code:

find . -maxdepth 3 -type f -name "*.doc" -exec cat {} \;

Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

Thanks for the quick answer, Robin. Unfortunately, that still doesn't do what I need. The output is just one of the files. It is a file located in one of the subfolders, but it is as if it stopped searching after having found that .doc file, instead of continuing the search.
If it helps, I've found the following somewhere else (I can't post links yet), which can be used to recursively convert all doc files to txt:

Code:

find . -name *.doc -exec textutil -convert txt '{}' \;

Again, I need something similar, but I want to concatenate (-cat) all the files found.

Only one thing springs to mind, that being if you have the re-direct to a file within the -exec and \; like this:-

Code:

find . -maxdepth 3 -type f -name "*.doc" -exec cat {} > outputfile \;

If you do, change it to this:-

Code:

find . -maxdepth 3 -type f -name "*.doc" -exec cat {} \; > outputfile

Does that help? I don't know why the find would stop at all, so I'm hoping that it's actually doing the work, but overwriting the output for each file.



Robin

If those .doc files are MSWORD files, I don't this you can concatenate like so. They will have precursor info and also postfixes to the real text inside.