Terminal Command – How to Combine Multiple TXT Files into One

command lineterminaltext;

I'm trying to combine multiple txts into a big file. I want them to be put in sequence but this seems not to work properly.

At this time I tried from the terminal:cat *.txt >merged.txt but this seems to concatenate the files randomly.

In my folder I have all the files named with sequential numbers (from 1.txt to 10000.txt). Am I missing anything?

Best Answer

Globbing isn't random, it's guaranteed to be alphabetical (a.k.a. lexicographic order according to your locale), which is different from numeric sorting order.

You can use brace expansion for this. Replace '10' with the number of the last file.

cat {1..10}.txt > merged.txt

This uses bash brace expansion, which you can read about at LESS='+/Brace Expansion' man bash.

Note that unlike file globs, the brace expansion will generate arbitrary strings which need not be existing files; in this case that means you will get errors if there are files missing from the sequence (e.g. if 7.txt does not exist). However, this won't affect the contents of merged.txt which will be produced as expected.

Related Solutions

Move a file, replacing existing (if any), ideally by putting existing in the trash

I need to do some more research to get this right. I feel like its close, but applescript still doesn't like it. Maybe it will give you some ideas until I get back here to give it another shot. Btw this is going to be so much easier when you are using the choose file dialog.

heres my non-working (yet) attempt. If you don't be me to it ill try to finish the solution tomorrow.

# 1. get desktop folder
set desktopFolder to (((path to desktop from user domain) as string)) as alias


# 2.set source file
tell application "Finder" to ¬
set theFile to ((path to file "1.text" of folder (desktopFolder)) as string) as   alias


# 3.set destination file
tell application "Finder" to ¬
set theDestination to ((path to file "2.text" of folder (desktopFolder)) as string) as alias



# 4.make it happen
tell application "Finder" to move theFile to theDestination with replacing

MacOS – How to restore manually Saved State files of Terminal

It seems that the windows.plist has been corrupted during the backup, as it's empty.

The Terminal restores correctly when doing the following test:

Run Terminal.
Type anything like: echo test 1.
Kill the terminal explicitly, e.g.: killall Terminal.
Run again, it should have the previous message/state.
Removing files and restoring from it, it'll have the same state.

The corrupted .plist file can be manually rewritten by the following hacky steps:

Convert plist into its XML representation (Terminal will still recognise it):
```
plutil  -convert xml1 -o windows.plist windows.plist
```
Edit the file to match its windows id (NSWindowID) to the appropriate files. Or create as many new windows manually to have the same files, kill the terminal, replace only the window .data files and re-run again.

However if the data files are not inconsistent with plist file, the Terminal will restore the default session overriding your files.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Move a file, replacing existing (if any), ideally by putting existing in the trash

MacOS – How to restore manually Saved State files of Terminal

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