cat files from subdirectories output using same filename

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1

Hi,
I need to concatenate data files with a .mp extension that are stored in directories by year. I want to keep the same filename as an output for example:

for the file name p030.mp, which resides in the following subdirectories:

/2000/p030.mp
/2001/p030.mp
/2002/p030.mp

I want to:
concatenate p030.mp for 2000-2002 and output the concatenated file in a new directory, say:
/ifeeldumb/p030.mp

I can get this to work for a single file:
cat /2000/p030.mp /2001/p030.mp /2002/p030.mp > p030.mp

but I get lost when I try to put it in a loop and extract individual filenames for use with output names.

any help would be greatly appreciated, THANKS!!!!

2

Is there any pattern to p030? If you need to do, say, 001 through 999:

for ((N=1; N<1000; N++))
do
        FILENAME=`printf "p%03d.mp" "$N"`
        cat /200[0-2]/${FILENAME} > /ifeeldumb/${FILENAME}
done
3

Hi Corona688--

Thanks for your reply. To be more specific, p030.mp is the name of a station for GPS data. So, in each subdirectory by year, I have probably 50 different station names with the .mp extension. The only thing the station names (filenames) have in common, besides the .mp extension, is that they can only be 4 letter/number combos in length proceeding the .mp extension:

so they could be:
p030.mp
abcd.mp
abc0.mp
iid2.mp

To make it more confusing, I have data from 2006-2010 but some stations only have data from 2008-onward.

In terms of actual content within the station files, they may have different lines (different days of year present). Not sure if that matters.

Thanks for your help! I really appreciate it.

4

Something like this should work (assuming that your present working directory contains the 20?? directories.)

#!/usr/bin/env ksh

target=/tmp/cats
find 20?? -name "*.mp" | while read file
do
        base=${file##*/}    # ditch the directory portion of the filename
        cat $file >>$target/$base.new    # I like to add .new to prevent accidental overwriting while testing!
done

Change target to the directory you want to put the output files into and you're good to go.

5

Thanks, agama. The code you wrote worked like a charm! :slight_smile: