Merge CSV files from a command prompt

Last Updated on November 19, 2018 by Dave Farquhar

I had a bunch of CSV files I needed to merge. I don’t spend half an hour loading all of them into Excel and doing a bunch of copying and pasting. Here’s how I merge CSV files from a command prompt.


copy /b file1.csv+file2.csv+file3.csv master.csv

That’s all there is to it. Load the resulting file into Excel, remove the duplicate header rows, and I have one big, master CSV file to work with in a matter of seconds. You can concatenate as few or as many files as you want this way. I happened to have 20, so this bit of command line trickery probably really did save me half an hour.

If manual cleanup in Excel isn’t an option, here’s another way to merge CSV files.

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2 thoughts on “Merge CSV files from a command prompt

  • January 31, 2014 at 2:01 pm
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    I probably would have used Type and redirect, and after the first line, filtered the header:

    Type file1.csv > master.csv
    type file2.csv | filter “header” >> master.csv
    type file3.csv | filter “header” >> master.csv

    But then I’m old skool. 😉

  • January 31, 2014 at 2:03 pm
    Permalink

    Er, Find /v. I forgot I wrote a batch file called “filter” that does it for me. Sigh…

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