How do I concatenate two text files in PowerShell?

Question

I am trying to replicate the functionality of the cat command in Unix.

I would like to avoid solutions where I explicitly read both files into variables, concatenate the variables together, and then write out the concatenated variable.

Answer 1

Simply use the Get-Content and Set-Content cmdlets:

Get-Content inputFile1.txt, inputFile2.txt | Set-Content joinedFile.txt

You can concatenate more than two files with this style, too.

If the source files are named similarly, you can use wildcards:

Get-Content inputFile*.txt | Set-Content joinedFile.txt

Note 1: PowerShell 5 and older versions allowed this to be done more concisely using the aliases cat and sc for Get-Content and Set-Content respectively. However, these aliases are problematic because cat is a system command in *nix systems, and sc is a system command in Windows systems - therefore using them is not recommended, and in fact sc is no longer even defined as of PowerShell Core (v7). The PowerShell team recommends against using aliases in general.

Note 2: Be careful with wildcards - if you try to output to inputFiles.txt (or similar that matches the pattern), PowerShell will get into an infinite loop! (I just tested this.)

Note 3: Outputting to a file with > does not preserve character encoding! This is why using Set-Content is recommended.