How do I concatenate two text files in PowerShell?

Solution 1:

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. However, these aliases are problematic because cat is a system command in *nix systems, and sc is a system command in Windows systems - therefore using them is not recommended, and in fact sc is no longer even defined as of PowerShell Core (v7). The PowerShell team recommends against using aliases in general.

Note 2: Be careful with wildcards - if you try to output to inputFiles.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.

Solution 2:

Do not use >; it messes up the character encoding. Use:

Get-Content files.* | Set-Content newfile.file

Solution 3:

In cmd, you can do this:

copy one.txt+two.txt+three.txt four.txt

In PowerShell this would be:

cmd /c copy one.txt+two.txt+three.txt four.txt

While the PowerShell way would be to use gc, the above will be pretty fast, especially for large files. And it can be used on on non-ASCII files too using the /B switch.

Solution 4:

You could use the Add-Content cmdlet. Maybe it is a little faster than the other solutions, because I don't retrieve the content of the first file.

gc .\file2.txt| Add-Content -Path .\file1.txt

Solution 5:

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