Question

I am not sure what I am doing wrong in following situation – I want to merge multiple files into one, but I want to merge a lot of them, so I want to use something like this:

*input file* that contains lines 
file1.txt >> mergedfiles1.txt 
file2.txt >> mergedfiles1.txt 
file3.txt >> mergedfiles2.txt
file4.txt >> mergedfiles2.txt
...

If I try to use simple script as I usually do

cat *input file* | while read i
do
cat $i
done

it actually doesn’t merge the files, but writes

*content* of file1.txt
cat: >> : file does not exist
cat: mergedfiles1.txt : file does not exist

I have tried to put command cat right at the beginning of each line of the input file but it did not work as well.

I guess it is a simple mistake, but I am not able to find a solution.

Thanks for help.

Answer 1

You can merge your three files using cat this way:

cat file1 file2 filet3 > merged_files