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bashunixconcatenation
Richie Howard
Richie Howard

Reputation: 13

Concatenate files from different folders in bash

I have a directory containing 227 subdirectories, each of which contains a file with the same name (in.BV) that I would like to concatenate.

i.e. 

Directory
---------Subdirectory1
---------------in.BV various other files
---------Subdirectory2
---------------in.BV various other files

etc

These files called in.BV contain only text, and I would like to simply concatenate them into a single long text file.

I'm a novice, and this is what I have tried so far:

for d in */
do
        (cd $d cat *in.BV >> Newin.txt)
done

This gave me a blank Newin.txt. This exceeds my current understanding of bash scripting.

Thanks in advance!

Richie

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2596

Answers (2)

Kusalananda
Kusalananda

Reputation: 15613

Assuming you are in the Directory directory:

cat */in.BV >Newin.txt

Assuming you are somewhere above Directory:

shopt -s globstar
cat **/in.BV >Newin.txt
shopt -u globstar

This sets the globstar shell option in bash. With the option set, you may use ** to match any pathname (* only matches up to the next / in a pathname, but ** matches across /).

After the cat, which creates Newin.txt in the current directory, I unset the globstar option.

If you have a lot of files and if the shell has issues executing cat because the command line becomes too long, then see varlogtim's answer.

With new information given in comments below (files are to be concatenated in order depending on the subdirectory name):

Assuming you are in Directory:

cat Subdirectory{1..227}/in.BV >Newin.txt

Upvotes: 2

Tim
Tim

Reputation: 2187

Example:

root@dib:~# find ./ -type f -name in.BV
./test1/in.BV
./test1/test2/in.BV

Find with Exec:

root@dib:~# find ./ -type f -name in.BV -exec cat {} + |tee your_new_file.txt
asdf
asdf

Upvotes: 2

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