How do I concatenate two text files in PowerShell?

Question

I am trying to replicate the functionality of the cat command in Unix.

I would like to avoid solutions where I explicitly read both files into variables

Answer 1

To concat files in command prompt it would be

type file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt > files.txt

PowerShell converts the type command to Get-Content, which means you will get an error when using the type command in PowerShell because the Get-Content command requires a comma separating the files. The same command in PowerShell would be

Get-Content file1.txt,file2.txt,file3.txt | Set-Content files.txt

Answer 2

You can do something like:

get-content input_file1 > output_file
get-content input_file2 >> output_file

Where > is an alias for "out-file", and >> is an alias for "out-file -append".

Answer 3

If you need to order the files by specific parameter (e.g. date time):

gci *.log | sort LastWriteTime | % {$(Get-Content $_)} | Set-Content result.log

Answer 4

I think the "powershell way" could be :

set-content destination.log -value (get-content c:\FileToAppend_*.log )

Answer 5

Simply use the Get-Content and Set-Content cmdlets:

Get-Content inputFile1.txt, inputFile2.txt | Set-Content joinedFile.txt

You can concatenate more than two files with this style, too.

If the source files are named similarly, you can use wildcards:

Get-Content inputFile*.txt | Set-Content joinedFile.txt

Note 1: PowerShell 5 and older versions allowed this to be done more concisely using the aliases cat and sc for Get-Content and Set-Content respectively, but these aliases are deprecated and even removed in new versions, so it's best to avoid them.

Note 2: Be careful with wildcards - if you try to output to examples.txt (or similar that matches the pattern), PowerShell will get into an infinite loop! (I just tested this.)

Note 3: Outputting to a file with > does not preserve character encoding! This is why using Set-Content is recommended.