Concatenate text files with Windows command line,

Question

I need to concatenate some relatively large text files, and would prefer to do this via the command line. Unfortunately I only have Windows, and cannot install new software.

type file1.txt file2.txt > out.txt

allows me to almost get what I want, but I don't want the 1st line of file2.txt to be included in out.txt.

I have noticed that more has the +n option to specify a starting line, but I haven't managed to combine these to get the result I want. I'm aware that this may not be possible in Windows, and I can always edit out.txt by hand to get rid of the line, but is there a simple way of doing it from the command line?

Answer 1

Use the FOR command to echo a file line by line, and with the 'skip' option to miss a number of starting lines...

FOR /F "skip=1" %i in (file2.txt) do @echo %i

You could redirect the output of a batch file, containing something like...

FOR /F %%i in (file1.txt) do @echo %%i
FOR /F "skip=1" %%i in (file2.txt) do @echo %%i

Note the double % when a FOR variable is used within a batch file.

Answer 2

I know you said that you couldn't install any software, but I'm not sure how tight that restriction is. Anyway, I had the same issue (trying to concatenate two files with presumably the same headers) and I thought I'd provide an alternative answer for others who arrive at this page, since it worked just great for me.

After trying a whole bunch of commands in windows and being severely frustrated, and also trying all sorts of graphical editors that promised to be able to open large files, but then couldn't, I finally got back to my Linux roots and opened my Cygwin prompt. Two commands:

cp file1.csv out.csv
tail -n+2 file2.csv >> out.csv

For file1.csv 800MB and file2.csv 400MB, those two commands took under 5 seconds on my machine. In a Cygwin prompt, no less. I thought Linux commands were supposed to be slow in Cygwin but that approach took far less effort and was way easier than any windows approach I could find.

Answer 3

This takes Test.txt with headers and appends Test1.txt and Test2.txt and writes results to Testresult.txt file after stripping headers from second and third files respectively:

type C:\Test.txt > C:\Testresult.txt && more +1 C:\Test1.txt >> C:\Testresult.txt && more +1 C:\Test2.txt >> C:\Testresult.txt

Answer 4

I use this, and it works well for me:

TYPE \\Server\Share\Folder\*.csv >> C:\Folder\ConcatenatedFile.csv

Of course, before every run, you have to DELETE C:\Folder\ConcatenatedFile.csv

The only issue is that if all files have headers, then it will be repeated in all files.

Answer 5

more +2 file2.txt > temp
type temp file1.txt > out.txt

or you can use copy. See copy /? for more.

copy /b temp+file1.txt  out.txt