Combining Files in PowerShell

If you need to combine text files in cmd.exe, you would issue the following command:

copy file1.txt+file2.txt+file3.txt combined_files.txt

If you wish to do the same for binary files, you would use the following command:

copy /b file1.bin+file2.bin+file3.bin combined_files.bin

To do the same in PowerShell is pretty straightforward.  If the destination file does not already exist or already contains content, you’ll want to issue the New-Item command first.  If you know it doesn’t exist or is empty, you can skip that line, below.

New-Item -ItemType file ".\combined_files.txt" –force

Get-Content .\file?.txt | Add-Content .\combined_files.txt

Thanks to Gerardo Lopez for his “Combine or Join Two Text Files Using PowerShell” article, which is the basis for this information.

Rob

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2014
  I'd suggest another algorythm for BIG files. I tried your version for 30 files with a sum of 1,6 GB data and ran into a RAM limitation. New-Item -ItemType file ".combined_files.txt" –force Get-ChildItem -filter "file?.txt" | %{ Get-Content $_ | Add-Content .combined_files.txt }

• Anonymous
  April 12, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2014
  Thanks to both of you for the feedback!

• Anonymous
  November 02, 2014
  None of your items worked for me. This is what actually worked since I just used it: Get-ChildItem -recurse -include "*.txt" | % { Get-Content $_ -ReadCount 0 | Add-Content .combined_files.txt }

• Anonymous
  May 06, 2016
  Hi Robert,Just found this very useful post. Any advice on how to exclude the header row for all files except the first?

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2016
  The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2016
    Sorry, with a filtering it's like this:ls "file?.txt" | cat > combined_files.txtThe command above always replace the combined_files.txt. If you wish to append then just replace > with >>.ls "file?.txt" | cat >> combined_files.txt