Unix: merge many files, while deleting first line of all files

Question

I have >100 files that I need to merge, but for each file the first line has to be removed. What is the most efficient way to do this under Unix? I suspect it's probably a command using cat and sed '1d'. All files have the same extension and are in the same folder, so we probably could use *.extension to point to the files. Many thanks!

Answer 1

Assuming your filenames are sorted in the order you want your files appended, you can use:

ls *.extension | xargs -n 1 tail -n +2 

EDIT: After Sorin and Gilles comments about the possible dangers of piping ls output, you could use:

find . -name "*.extension" | xargs -n 1 tail -n +2 

Answer 2

Everyone has to be complicated. This is really easy:

tail -q -n +2 file1 file2 file3 

And so on. If you have a large number of files you can load them in to an array first:

list=(file1 file2 file3) tail -q -n +2 "${list[@]}" 

All the files with a given extension in the current directory?

list=(*.extension) tail -q -n +2 "${list[@]}" 

Or just

tail -q -n +2 *.extension