Concatenate multiple files but include filename as section headers

unix header terminal concatenation cat
Nick picture Nick · May 6, 2011 · Viewed 192.5k times · Source

I would like to concatenate a number of text files into one large file in terminal. I know I can do this using the cat command. However, I would like the filename of each file to precede the "data dump" for that file. Anyone know how to do this?

what I currently have:

file1.txt = bluemoongoodbeer

file2.txt = awesomepossum

file3.txt = hownowbrowncow

cat file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

desired output:

file1

bluemoongoodbeer

file2

awesomepossum

file3

hownowbrowncow

Answer

DS. picture DS. · Oct 19, 2011

Was looking for the same thing, and found this to suggest:

tail -n +1 file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

Output:

==> file1.txt <==
<contents of file1.txt>

==> file2.txt <==
<contents of file2.txt>

==> file3.txt <==
<contents of file3.txt>

If there is only a single file then the header will not be printed. If using GNU utils, you can use -v to always print a header.

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