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Concatenate Multiple Files
Often large collections of data will be broken into multiple smaller files. The command line makes it easy to concatenate the contents of these files into a single file for analysis.
Create Multiple Files
In this example each file contains a single record of a sale, however in the real world each file can contain hundreds or even millions of records.
echo 'Alan Jones', '$50' > sales_records_1.csv
echo 'Stephanie Lawson', '$20' > sales_records_2.csv
echo 'Lester Holt', '$10' > sales_records_3.csv
Append All Files To A Single File
Specifically, what we are doing in the code below is appending (>>
) every file with sales_records_
in the file name (e.g. sales_records_1.csv
) to a file called sales_records.csv
.
cat sales_records_* >> sales_records.csv
View The Single File To Confirm The Appending Worked
cat sales_records.csv
Alan Jones, $50
Stephanie Lawson, $20
Lester Holt, $10
Note that the contents of the files were concatenated in ascending order, meaning sales_records_1.csv
’s data comes before sales_records_1.csv
’s data in the final file.