I want to do exactly what unix "cat" does, but on my PC. Is there a simple equivalent command for the Windows command line?
Specifically I want to create a file from all the files of a given type in a folder
In Unix:
cat *fna >all_fna_files.fna
(which joins all the ".fna" text files into one big text file)
typeIt works across command.com, cmd, and PowerShell (though in the latter it's an alias for Get-Content, so is cat, so you could use either).
From the Wikipedia article (emphasis mine):
In computing, type is a command in various VMS. AmigaDOS, CP/M, DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows command line interpreters (shells) such as COMMAND.COM, cmd.exe, 4DOS/4NT and Windows PowerShell. It is used to display the contents of specified files. It is analogous to the Unix cat command.
C:\>echo hi > a.txt
C:\>echo bye > b.txt
C:\>type a.txt b.txt > c.txt
C:\>type c.txt
hi
bye
From the command shell:
copy a.txt + b.txt + c.txt output.txt
(But that follows the command shells use of control-Z as an end of file marker, so not suitable in some cases).
In PowerShell:
get-content a.txt,b.txt,c.txt | out-file output.txt
and you can control (using -Encoding parameter) the file encoding (which allows transcoding by using different encoding for the read and write).
I have just used the cat command in DOS (Windows 7 Pro) in the following manner and successfully merged 3 files (log1.txt, log2.txt, log3.txt) into a single file:
cat log*.txt >> myBigLogFile.txt
Note: cat log*.txt > myBigLogFile2.txt also provide the same result, but it'll override the previous file.
If you want to do
cat >NewTextFile.txt
to save clipboard into a text file on Windows (which is how I came to this question), you can do
copy con: NewTextFile.txt
And then CTRL+V.
