UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am trying to append multiple files in a directory

Code:

cat /a/file1.txt /a/file2.txt /a/file3.txt /a/file4.txt > /a/file.txt

Except file2 every other file is appending.

I interchanged file names and ran the command. Whatever file repeating in the second position is missing in output file.
Is there any other way to append other than cat, I mean either using awk or sed.

What operating system and shell are you using?

What output do you get from the command?:

Code:

type cat

What output do you get from the command?:

Code:

ls -l /a/file[1-4].txt /a/file.txt

I use an ETL tool which is installed on Linux but we have a command stage which will let us use one line unix commands.

Code:

type cat 

output

cat is /bin/cat

ls -l /a/file[1-4].txt /a/file.txt

Output

/a/file[1-4].txt no such file or directory.

This forum is for UNIX and Linux system commands. You are not using a shell; you're using "an ETL tool" which does not know how to do wildcard expansions, discards the 3rd word in every command line, and which I assume has other side effects that you have not described.

If you want advice about how to use UNIX and Linux system utilities, we'll be glad to help you. If you want advice about how to use a tool we have never seen, that you have not named, that we have no man page for, and that we have no way to search for it with Google; I have no idea how we can help you.

We does use UNIX commands

If you can tell me other way to do the task I can try and let you know.

If you search my posts before I wrote here many times for support and everyone suggested a lot of unix commands which does helped me in using.

we just have a GUI version in ETL tool which let us use

Perl scripts, DOS batch files, and other command-line executable programs that you can call if they are not interactive.

The cat command that doesn't work for you is a UNIX command that would work just fine if you were executing it directly with a non-interactive shell script on any UNIX or Linux system. So, what you have told us is incorrect. We can give you an awk script that will do what cat does; we can give you a sed script that will do what cat does; we can give you a shell script that will do what cat does. But if cat doesn't work, we have absolutely no reason to think that an awk, ed, ex, more, less, sed, or shell script is going to work either.

If what you said about being able to execute the command:

Code:

cat /a/file1.txt /a/file2.txt /a/file3.txt /a/file4.txt > /a/file.txt

and it works fine except that it doesn't process the 2nd file operand is true, put in a dummy 2nd file operand and try again:

Code:

cat /a/file1.txt /this/operand/will/be/ignored /a/file2.txt /a/file3.txt /a/file4.txt > /a/file.txt

or:

Code:

cat /a/file1.txt /a/file2.txt /a/file2.txt /a/file3.txt /a/file4.txt > /a/file.txt

Thanks for your inputs

Dummy file didn't work either

---------- Post updated at 09:40 AM ---------- Previous update was at 01:07 AM ----------

Posted question in stack exchange and got this answer which worked. Thought to post here so if someone like me accidentally comes here can get an answer.

Code:

find . -type f | xargs cat | tee outputfile.txt

---------- Post updated at 01:33 PM ---------- Previous update was at 09:40 AM ----------

My sincere apologies,

Cat worked perfectly.

I had the first file with fixed length so it went out of actual window size and couldn't notice.

Sorry again.