Concatenate text files with Windows command line, dropping leading lines

Question

I need to concatenate some relatively large text files, and would prefer to do this via the command line. Unfortunately I only have Windows, and cannot install new software.

Answer 1

I know you said that you couldn't install any software, but I'm not sure how tight that restriction is. Anyway, I had the same issue (trying to concatenate two files with presumably the same headers) and I thought I'd provide an alternative answer for others who arrive at this page, since it worked just great for me.

After trying a whole bunch of commands in windows and being severely frustrated, and also trying all sorts of graphical editors that promised to be able to open large files, but then couldn't, I finally got back to my Linux roots and opened my Cygwin prompt. Two commands:

cp file1.csv out.csv
tail -n+2 file2.csv >> out.csv

For file1.csv 800MB and file2.csv 400MB, those two commands took under 5 seconds on my machine. In a Cygwin prompt, no less. I thought Linux commands were supposed to be slow in Cygwin but that approach took far less effort and was way easier than any windows approach I could find.