Taking notes and saving them as text files in computer is something that I normally do everyday. In fact my desktop is filled with text files because I prefer to save them there so that it is easier for me to access the text files. One way to keep my desktop less clutter is to combine all the text files into one. There are also many other reasons as to why you would like combine all text files into one. Perhaps you have CD filled with readme’s and you’d like to automatically search and combine all of them so that you can read them all at once, or if you are on a working environment, you may want to combine reports, backup or network log files. Or perhaps you come across a very special situation where you are given a task to look for non repeating keywords from thousands of text files and you can easily complete the task by combining them into one text file and use a duplicate lines remover to show only unique words.
TXTcollector is a free and simple tool that is able to automatically help you merge all text files located in a folder and subfolders. By default TXTcollector only supports 12 text file formats but if you want to select ALL files in a folder, click the Extensions and Separators link on the program which will open a folder containing two text files which are extensions.txt and separators.txt. Open the extensions.txt with Notepad, add an asterisk character * at the last line and save it. Now run TXTcollector and you should see the asterisk on the file extension drop down menu.
To combine the text files, first browse the folder containing the text files that you want to merge, select the options such as separator, filename, carriage returns, add space character and click the Combine all files button. You will be prompted to select the location where you want to save the combined file. The merging process generally takes a couple of seconds depending on how large and how many text files you are combining.
After merging the text files, you can use Notepad++ or TextCrawler to remove duplicate lines.
TXTcollector is free and runs from Windows 95 to Windows 7.
Combine or Merge All Text Files with TXTcollector is a post from: Raymond.CC Blog