command for joining a series of files together

Question

I have...

me@computer:~/gutenberg/euclid$ ls

book01.html book04.html book07.html book10.html book13.html book02.html book05.html book08.html book11.html book03.html book06.html book09.html book12.html

and I want to join all these .html files into the same big file, in order. What command or command sequence can I use?

Answer 1

In this particular case cat book??.html > book.html will work fine, if you don't care about proper HTML format.

For a more general case, say you had "book1.html" instead of "book01.html", "book2.html" instead of "book02.html" and so forth. The file names don't sort lexically the same as logically. You can do something like this:

(echo book?.html | sort; echo book??.html | sort) | xargs cat > book.html

So in general: script_generating_file_names_in_order | xargs cat > all_one_file

That idiom can go a long way.

Answer 2

I buy the remarks about head/tail, and have a solution, sorted by number without that xargs/sort/echo stuff.

cat book{01..12}.html book-all.html

Answer 3

If you use GNU sort you can use sort -V to sort the names in the correct order:

$ echo -e "book4\nbook2\nbook17\nbook12" | sort -V
book2
book4
book12
book17

This works for any number of files:

ls book*.html | sort -V | xargs cat > allbooks.html

Answer 4

The simple solution will probably work, if your browser is permissiv.

cat book[0-9]*.html > book.html

Sure you could go around stripping stuff to be probably slightly more legal:

perl -e 'undef($/); for($x=0;$x<=$#ARGV;$x++) { open(X,"<",$ARGV[$x]); $_ = <X>; close(X); s/.*<body[^>]*>//s unless ($x == 0);  s|</body>|| unless ($x == $#ARGV); print;' book[0-9]*.html > book.html

But that is no guarantee that you will really have everything you need either, if the chapters have different styles or javascript or whatever.