Python concatenate text files

Question

I have a list of 20 file names, like [\'file1.txt\', \'file2.txt\', ...]. I want to write a Python script to concatenate these files into a new file. I could op

Answer 1

This should do it

For large files:

filenames = ['file1.txt', 'file2.txt', ...]
with open('path/to/output/file', 'w') as outfile:
    for fname in filenames:
        with open(fname) as infile:
            for line in infile:
                outfile.write(line)

For small files:

filenames = ['file1.txt', 'file2.txt', ...]
with open('path/to/output/file', 'w') as outfile:
    for fname in filenames:
        with open(fname) as infile:
            outfile.write(infile.read())

… and another interesting one that I thought of:

filenames = ['file1.txt', 'file2.txt', ...]
with open('path/to/output/file', 'w') as outfile:
    for line in itertools.chain.from_iterable(itertools.imap(open, filnames)):
        outfile.write(line)

Sadly, this last method leaves a few open file descriptors, which the GC should take care of anyway. I just thought it was interesting