What is going wrong with cat

i have a very basic cat problem. I have 23 files, all is one line and around 100000 columns. I am trying to merge these one lines. I type the command cat test1 test2 > outcome The command line is not giving me any error but it just prints the test1 to the output. Is there any limitations to cat command? or if the number of columns are different, does cat not like it? or any missing data? How can I check my one line to see what is going wrong? Thanks

user1007742

Posted 2012-12-06T11:48:06.290

Reputation: 101

Does test1 have a newline at the end? If not, the output of cat will be a single line. Perhaps you can try: echo > newline; cat test1 newline test2 newline > output. – William Pursell – 2012-12-06T18:04:44.857

Answers

To collaborate partially, you can eliminate wrong syntax, column number matching and missing data (whatever this means). I am don't know about particular limitations (although there certainly are some).

Some ideas:

Try with two files with lines under 300 chars, just to check if there is some general problem with your system. If it works, it is some limit after all..
Try without redirecting to a file (that is without > output)
Try which cat

Petar Donchev

Posted 2012-12-06T11:48:06.290

Reputation: 131