Why does this not work? “ls *.txt | xargs cat > all.txt” (all files into single txt document)

Question

Why does this not work?

ls *.txt | xargs cat > all.txt

(I want to join the contents of all text files into a single 'all.txt' file.) find with -exec should also work, but I would really like to understand the xargs syntax.

Thanks

Answer 1

ls *.txt | xargs cat >> all.txt

might work a bit better, since it would append to all.txt instead of creating it again after each file.

By the way, cat *.txt >all.txt would also work. :-)

Answer 2

If some of your file names contain ', " or space xargs will fail because of The separator problem http ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xargs#The_separator_problem

In general never run xargs without -0 as it will come back and bite you some day.

Consider using GNU Parallel instead:

ls *.txt | parallel cat > tmp/all.txt

or if you prefer:

ls *.txt | parallel cat >> tmp/all.txt

Learn more about GNU Parallel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ

Answer 3

all.txt is a file in the same directory, so cat gets confused when it wants to write from the same file to the same file.

On the other hand:

ls *.txt | xargs cat > tmp/all.txt

This will read from textfiles in your current directory into the all.txt in a subdirectory (not included with *.txt).