Question

What’s the best way of concatenating binary files using Powershell?
I’d prefer a one-liner that simple to remember and fast to execute.

The best I’ve come up with is:

gc -Encoding Byte -Path ".\File1.bin",".\File2.bin" | sc -Encoding Byte new.bin

This seems to work ok, but is terribly slow with large files.

Answer 1

The approach you’re taking is the way I would do it in PowerShell. However you should use the -ReadCount parameter to improve perf. You can also take advantage of positional parameters to shorten this even further:

gc File1.bin,File2.bin -Encoding Byte -Read 512 | sc new.bin -Encoding Byte

^{Editor’s note: In the cross-platform PowerShell (Core) edition (version 6 and up), -AsByteStream must now be used instead of -Encoding Byte; also, the sc alias for the Set-Content cmdlet has been removed.}

Regarding the use of the -ReadCount parameter, I did a blog post on this a while ago that folks might find useful – Optimizing Performance of Get Content for Large Files.