Combine columns from several files into one

Question

I have several files with two columns : file 1:

1 100
2 103 

file 2

1 200
2 203

and around 600 such files with two columns.

Now, I would like to combine the second column in every file of the first row in the correct sequence to get a single data file like :

100
200
.
.
. (600 lines)

How do I do that?

Answer 1

awk 'FNR==1 {print $2}' file*

This prints the second column ($2) of the first line (FNR==1) for every file whose filename starts with file.

An alternative is to print the first line and then immediately skip to the next file (nextfile is a mawk and GNU awk-specific keyword):

awk '{print $2; nextfile}' file*

Answer 2

Best answer has been given above. Tried with below command

for i in file1 file2; do awk 'NR==1{print $2}' $i; done
100
200