Joining Files

neGev

Hey, gonna keep this short and sweet. I know its not quite Windows, but anyway...

I'm trying to join several parts of a file together into one one single file because of a maximum file size on a server.
To do this, I'm using DOS within windows 2000, with the command:
type *.* > (output file)
Now usually this works fine, but sometimes the output file ends up twice the size it should.
e.g Joining 2 x 256Mb files leaves me with a single 1Gig file.
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

ColmOT [MSFT]

What file system are you using?

type *.* > myFile.txt is literally echoing the contents and piping them to the text file. This shouldn't result in a 4x increase in the file size.

Are you sure that no other files are sneaking into the myFile.txt output file?

Capt'n Midnight

'course if the file is twice as big - maybe you are copying the temp file to itself - direct the O/P to a different folder

md folder
type *.* > folder\bigfile

copy /b file1.ext + file2.txt + file3.csv bigfile.tmp

your way of copying will only copy files that can be displayes on screen - ie. no end of file characters.
copy/b allow you to concatonate into one zip file when you get them spread over a few floppies etc. msbackup in Dos 5 etc. will split a file over several disks - no compression, just rename it and use copy/b to join the bits together

ps. use FC to verify what you get is what you want.

neGev

OK, thanks both for the replies, I'll give what you suggested a whirl and report back.

neGev

Originally posted by ColmOT [MSFT]
What file system are you using?

I'm using NTFS. Sorry, I missed that before.