Unix / bash: reading a list of files and combining them into a file

Question

I am trying to figure out a script file that contains a file containing a list of files (each line is the path to the file, that is, the path / in / file) and merge them into a file.

For instance:

list.text -- path/to/filename filename 

Then call the script like this

merge_script.sh list.txt final_file.txt

Any help is appreciated. I am very disabled with a bash script and I hope that some unix gurus will help me quickly come up with this. Otherwise, it will take me a couple of hours to do it right (well, assuming that I someday understood this). I searched for some examples and combined them. So far no luck.

Thanks Jack

Answer 1

 xargs < list.text cat > final_file.txt 

xargs will send file names from list.text to cat batches (so they won’t overflow the command line). Then, cat will print the contents of each file with the output redirected to final_file.text .