File manipulation ?

[Bob Goodwin]

Aaron Konstam wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-07-29 at 12:04 -0400, Bob Goodwin wrote:
>   
>> Erich Carlson wrote:
>>     
>>> On Sat, 2006-07-29 at 11:25 -0400, Bob Goodwin wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> Can someone tell me how to combine a number of
>>>> text files into one file?
>>>>
>>>> I have about fifty open office [.odt] text files
>>>> that I would like to combine into one file containing
>>>> all of that text.  Nothing I have tried is acceptable
>>>> to open office?
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> have you tried "cat file1 file2 > combinedfile
>>>
>>>
>>>   
>>>       
>> Yes, the result was a huge file and OO only displayed one page 
>> containing the last two lines?
>>
>> Bob
>>
>>     
> I would be surprised if odt were really plain text files. I suspect they
> would contain OOwrite formating commands which would make combining two
> of these files not to work. The file might contain a formatting command
> that this is the end of the document which sounds like what is happening
> to you. Sound like a tedious job using copy and paste would be a
> possibility.
>   
Yes, that appears to be the case.

I have been making a collection of notes for a year or more, much of it 
obtained from this list but it was just a random collection of files 
created with a text editor [e3em] which I needed to organize in some 
logical fashion. 

I spent most of yesterday copy/pasting into separate files in OO which 
saved them as .odt files and I naively thought I could assemble those 
files into one big sorted file.  It didn't work for the reasons you 
mention.  But OO also allows saving as plain text which I did in less 
than an hour and now have 84 pages nicely sorted in the beginnings of 
some logical order and can edit further to my satisfaction.

All help is appreciated, thank you.

Bob Goodwin