Is there a way to reassemble files split without enumerating all of the parts explicitly?

Question

I used split -b 32m "file.bz2" "file.bz2.part-" to split a file and it created more than 50 parts. From googling, the way I found to reassemble the parts is to cat file.bz2.part-aa file.bz2.part-ab > file.bz2, while enumerating all the 50+ parts. Is there an easier way to reassemble the parts wherein I no longer need to list all those parts explicitly?

I'm using Fedora 12.

Answer 1

This is what wildcards and brace expansion are for. See if echo file.bz2.part-* returns the filenames in the desired order, and use cat file.bz2.part-* > file.bz2 if it does. Otherwise, figure out some other more complex expansion that does.

Answer 2

split creates its partial file names in ascending lexicographical order. Since wildcard expansions lists the files in lexicographical order, cat file.bz2part-* > file.bz2 will concatenate the parts in the right order.

Answer 3

Try:

for i in `ls file.part-* |sort`; do echo $i; cat $i >> newfile; done