How do I concatenate two text files in PowerShell?
PowershellMergeText FilesPowershell 2.0Powershell Problem Overview
I am trying to replicate the functionality of the cat command in Unix.
I would like to avoid solutions where I explicitly read both files into variables, concatenate the variables together, and then write out the concatenated variable.
Powershell Solutions
Solution 1 - Powershell
Simply use the Get-Content and Set-Content cmdlets:
Get-Content inputFile1.txt, inputFile2.txt | Set-Content joinedFile.txt
You can concatenate more than two files with this style, too.
If the source files are named similarly, you can use wildcards:
Get-Content inputFile*.txt | Set-Content joinedFile.txt
Note 1: PowerShell 5 and older versions allowed this to be done more concisely using the aliases cat and sc for Get-Content and Set-Content respectively. However, these aliases are problematic because cat is a system command in *nix systems, and sc is a system command in Windows systems - therefore using them is not recommended, and in fact sc is no longer even defined as of PowerShell Core (v7). The PowerShell team recommends against using aliases in general.
Note 2: Be careful with wildcards - if you try to output to inputFiles.txt (or similar that matches the pattern), PowerShell will get into an infinite loop! (I just tested this.)
Note 3: Outputting to a file with > does not preserve character encoding! This is why using Set-Content is recommended.
Solution 2 - Powershell
Do not use >; it messes up the character encoding. Use:
Get-Content files.* | Set-Content newfile.file
Solution 3 - Powershell
In cmd, you can do this:
copy one.txt+two.txt+three.txt four.txt
In PowerShell this would be:
cmd /c copy one.txt+two.txt+three.txt four.txt
While the PowerShell way would be to use gc, the above will be pretty fast, especially for large files. And it can be used on on non-ASCII files too using the /B switch.
Solution 4 - Powershell
You could use the Add-Content cmdlet. Maybe it is a little faster than the other solutions, because I don't retrieve the content of the first file.
gc .\file2.txt| Add-Content -Path .\file1.txt
Solution 5 - Powershell
To concat files in command prompt it would be
type file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt > files.txt
PowerShell converts the type command to Get-Content, which means you will get an error when using the type command in PowerShell because the Get-Content command requires a comma separating the files. The same command in PowerShell would be
Get-Content file1.txt,file2.txt,file3.txt | Set-Content files.txt
Solution 6 - Powershell
If you need to order the files by specific parameter (e.g. date time):
gci *.log | sort LastWriteTime | % {$(Get-Content $_)} | Set-Content result.log
Solution 7 - Powershell
I used:
Get-Content c:\FileToAppend_*.log | Out-File -FilePath C:\DestinationFile.log
-Encoding ASCII -Append
This appended fine. I added the ASCII encoding to remove the nul characters Notepad++ was showing without the explicit encoding.
Solution 8 - Powershell
To keep encoding and line endings:
Get-Content files.* -Raw | Set-Content newfile.file -NoNewline
Note: AFAIR, whose parameters aren't supported by old Powershells (<3? <4?)
Solution 9 - Powershell
You can do something like:
get-content input_file1 > output_file
get-content input_file2 >> output_file
Where > is an alias for "out-file", and >> is an alias for "out-file -append".
Solution 10 - Powershell
Since most of the other replies often get the formatting wrong (due to the piping), the safest thing to do is as follows:
add-content $YourMasterFile -value (get-content $SomeAdditionalFile)
I know you wanted to avoid reading the content of $SomeAdditionalFile into a variable, but in order to save for example your newline formatting i do not think there is proper way to do it without.
A workaround would be to loop through your $SomeAdditionalFile line by line and piping that into your $YourMasterFile. However this is overly resource intensive.
Solution 11 - Powershell
I think the "powershell way" could be :
set-content destination.log -value (get-content c:\FileToAppend_*.log )