Cat files except one

Question

I'm looking for something to concatenate all files with given extension within a directory, except one. Like:

cat *.txt !(DISCARD.txt)  > catKEPT

This should concatenate all *.txt files in directory, except DISCARD.txt.

Related: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/153863/38906 – cuonglm Nov 28 '15 at 10:51 — cuonglm, Nov 28 '15 at 10:51

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 28 '15 at 10:45

6

find . -maxdepth 1 -iname '*.txt' -not -name 'DISCARD.txt' -exec cat {} +>catKEPT

answered Nov 28 '15 at 10:45

cas

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score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

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If you are using bash (most of the time this is the case), you may use the extglob shell option that will extend your shell with a more powerful pattern matching syntax.

You can turn it on with shopt -s extglob, and turn it off with shopt -u extglob.

In your example, you would simply do:

$ shopt -s extglob
$ cat -- !(DISCARD).txt > catKEPT

You can find more about this command in this StackOverflow answer.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

Community

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answered Nov 28 '15 at 10:51

perror

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I tried it, but command got stuck (no output) – dovah Nov 28 '15 at 11:15
Are you sure you have `bash` ? Try `echo $SHELL` to know what shell you are using. – perror Nov 28 '15 at 11:16
OP wants to cat only `.txt` files so you'll have to use the glob like this: `cat -- !(DISCARD).txt` – don_crissti Nov 28 '15 at 11:32

Cat files except one

2 Answers2