Question

Dear Unix users I have for example 6 folders and in each folder I have a file called file.txt. The name of the file is exactly the same in all the folders I have. I would like to move all the files called file.txt from each of the 6 folders into a general folder that will contain all the files because I would like to concatenate the files finally. How this can be done?

Input:
folder1: file.txt, folder2: file.txt, folder3: file.txt

Output:
final_folder: file.txt, file.txt, file.txt

Thanks

Eleonora

Answer 1

You cannot have multiple files with the same name within the same directory. If you’re planning to eventually concatenate all the files, while not just do it all at once?

For example, the following command will concatenate all file.txt files within directories with names that start with folder and write the output to new_file.txt:

cat folder*/file.txt > new_file.txt

If you want to include files within multi-level subdirectories, you can consider using find.
The following will recursively search for file.txt within the current directory (and all subdirectories) and concatenate their contents into new_file.txt.

find . -name file.txt -exec cat {} \; > new_file.txt