Combine Several .doc Files to One?

[NevilsStation]

Is there a simple program somewhere that will combine multiple .doc files in a folder into one, please?

I've tried

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cat *.doc > bigfile.doc

and

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find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*.doc" -print0 | xargs -0 cat > bigfile.doc

but in both cases bigfile.com only displays one of the documents (even though the file that's created is the right size to host them all).

Thanks!

[Jerry3904]

I do it this way:

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cat text1 text2 text3 > bigtext

[Richard]

Thanks.
Good to know.

[NevilsStation]

I do it this way:

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cat text1 text2 text3 > bigtext

I will try that - I saw it but had ignored it in favor of using a wildcard.

I'm trying to avoid having to type in the names of every file ... sometimes there may be dozens of them.

Why doesn't a wildcard work, please?

[NevilsStation]

No joy.

bigfile is the correct size for the two named files I specified but only the content of one of the originals is displayed when it's opened.

This is very odd ...

[old_guy]

NevilsStation
That won't work. The unix/linux commands like cat work with plain text files .Your .doc files have many many format commands included that can't be handled. To see, try to open one of your .doc files in featherpad.
You will have to cut/paste the contents of each .doc file into one new .doc file.
Earl

[fehlix]

@NevilsStation,
you can concatenat text files (aka "ascii" text files),
but you can't concatenate word-doc files to create a valid doc file.

What I would do:
- convert the doc to LibreOffice odt-files as show in this example:
( needs unoconv to be installed )

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unoconv -f odt -o my_odt_dir  *.doc

- convert the xml-based odt-files into one big odt-LO-file
using OOoPy from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/ooopy/
extract and install like this

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  sudo python ./setup.py install    

and merge/concatenate odt-files like this:

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  ooo_cat --output-file my_big.odt  file1.odt file2.odt file3.odt 
# or
  ooo_cat --output-file my_big.odt  *.odt 

Sure some formating might be lost during convertion from doc to odt.
If you only interested int the "Text" without formatiing just convert doc to txt

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  unoconv -f txt -o my_txt_dir  *.doc

and use

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cat *.txt > my_big_txt_file.txt

[clicktician]

If you only interested int the "Text" without formating just convert doc to txt

Very useful. I wish we still had the "thank" button on posts.

[Jerry3904]

You can also open one in LibreOffice, and repeatedly click Insert > Text from File. Then save as a new document.

Obviously not useful when there are zillions...

[NevilsStation]

Lots to try a bit later ... when I've lost daylight.

Question: The purpose of this exercise is to create an epub and/or other ebook format.

Each file is a chapter in a book of seven chapters.

Is there a program I can just point at the folder & which will can handle that, or
do I in any case have to concatenate them into a single file - with formatting
intact?

Thanks!