Still learning...

[alexpgp]

One thing I learned yesterday was that tar files are not for editing. :)

I thought I had stumbled upon a slick way of concatenating a group of text files (which is what HTML files are, essentially) into one large file (which is what tar does, essentially), but was disabused of that notion when I tried to "untar" the result, which threw a bunch of errors at me. The content had somehow, "inexplicably" changed (because I had changed it using a text editor), and that was enough to throw everything off.

All was not lost, however, as I was able to open the edited tar file and manually extract all forty-odd files, one by one, and save them as required. Something of a lesson for me, I guess.

My eyeballs are ready to stage a coup d'etat, so I think I'll quit the house for a few hours and go look at trees, or something.

Cheers...

Comments

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

I thought I had stumbled upon a slick way of concatenating a group of text files ... into one large file


Use cat. Given three text files whose content is the same as the file name ...

% ls
one.txt three.txt two.txt
% cat one.txt two.txt three.txt > four.txt
% more four.txt
one
two
three
%

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Ah, but what I need is something that'll take one.txt, two.txt, and three.txt and create a file that looks like this:

--one.txt--
one
--two.txt--
two
--three.txt--
three

so I can go in, edit the content (making sure not to mess with file delimiters), and eventually use another one-liner to split this combined file into its constituents.

With a little time, I'm sure I could've put together a suitable Perl script to do the job, but a wholly inadequate knowledge of how tar works led me astray.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Cheers...