Concatenating a list of files in bash

Posted on 7th May, 2010, under the categories aside and bash. View comments or add a comment. Permalink

I had the need to concat a list of files like this:

~/Downloads
    file_1.001
    file_1.002
    file_2.001
    file_2.002
    file_3.001
    file_3.002
    file_4.001
    file_4.002

The command to concat the files individually would be:

$ cat file_1.00* > file_1

But to do it individually would take a while. Luckily, a simple bash script did the trick:

for f in $(ls *.001); do
    target=${f%.*}
    catname=".00*"
    cat $target$catname > $target;
done