Combine

If you have multiple documents at hand and wish to put all text into a single file, you can use Combine to quickly get the job done.

You don't have to go through an installation to be able to use this program. Because it's based on a tiny .exe file, you can launch it as soon as the download is over. This means that you can keep Combine stored in your collection of portable software and fire it up whenever you need to join multiple text files into a single document.

The application can only be accessed from a console window since there is no graphical interface available. Even so, it's pretty easy to use. The syntax is COMBINE [/a] [/fl] [/lb] [/nolist] [/nologo] [/nosum] [/s] target file1 file2 ..., which can be brought up to the screen anytime you need to remember the commands by writing "COMBINE" or "COMBINE.txt" without any other arguments.

To combine two or more files with the default configuration, it's necessary to first write the name of the destination file, and then the names of the files you want to join. Make sure to include file paths too, if they are in different locations on the hard drive. It's also mandatory to specify the file extension.

The program works by adding the text of each file to the new one, depending on the order you indicated in the command prompt window. In the end, you get one large file with all text content extracted from the source files. Please note that the source files are not destroyed, so there's no need to create backups when using this app.

Once the files have been merged together, you can check out the status for each item along with the size of the resulted file. It can be immediately opened in your file browser to see if Combine did its job well.

A cool thing about this app is that it's capable of combining files of different formats and producing a new type of file, as long as they have the text content type. For example, you can merge TXT with RTF to generate a CSV file. ASCII, Unicode and UTF-8 are supported. However, it doesn't work with other content types (although no errors are mentioned in the console when attempted to do this, we tried with a couple of JPEGs).

Information about the optional commands are available on the developer's website. All aspects considered, Combine may not have an abundance of features but offers a clear-cut solution for swiftly merging two or more text documents into one. You just have to be comfortable around the command-line environment.