Merging .txt / .csv / .tsv files

If you have a collection of tab or comma delimited files that you want to combine or merge into one document, you can use the CMD TYPE command:

type *.txt > mergedfile.txt

type *.txt > mergedfile.txt

The TYPE command displays the contents of one or more text files to the console.

This will work as long as each file follows the same formatting. For example, you can use it to combine files that are either all tab delimited or comma delimited, but you shouldn’t use it to combine a .tsv with a .csv.

The TYPE command accepts one or more files as a parameter. In this case I used the wildcard character (*) to pass all files in the current directory ending in .txt as arguments to the TYPE command.

The ‘>’ symbol redirects the output to a destination of our choice. Without this symbol TYPE would output the merged file straight to the console. In most cases we want to save the merged file to use for some other purpose, so we redirect the output to a file of our choosing. You can name mergedfile.txt anything you want.

Example:

Suppose we have two tab delimited files: file1.tsv and file2.tsv

file1.tsv

First Name	Last Name	Age

file2.tsv

John	Doe     30
Jane	Smith	53

Make sure you are in the directory that contains file1 and file2 and enter the command:

type file1.tsv file2.tsv > mergedfiles.tsv

And the result is:

mergedfiles.tsv

First Name	Last Name	Age
John	Doe	30
Jane	Smith	53