Concatenating 1000s of pairs of fasta files

Question

[shreyasibiswas88]

Hi,

I have one folder with 25000 fasta files named Rnor.01.fa, Rnor.02.fa, ... and another folder with 25000 fasta files named Rrat.01.fa, Rrat.02.fa, ....

I want to concatenate Rnor.01.fa and Rrat.01.fa into a file Rnor_Rrat.01.fa and likewise Rnor.02.fa with Rrat.02.fa to ultimately have 25000 files each containing fasta sequences from each species.

I am new to programing and can't seem to figure out how to use cat to be able to do so.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

have a look at cat http://linux.die.net/man/1/cat ; http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4072361 ; ...

Answer 1

[Chris Miller]

Assuming that naming convention holds for all of your files:

mkdir tmp
ls -1 | cut -f 2 -d . | sort | uniq | while read i;do cat $(ls -1 *.$i.fa)  > $(ls -1 *.$i.fa | cut -f 1 -d . | perl -pe 's/\n/_/g').$i.fa; mv $(ls -1 *.$i.fa | grep -v _) tmp;done

Untested, and typed on my phone, so check with some echo statements before running it for real. (should preserve your original files in the tmp folder)

[shreyasibiswas88]

Thank you so much. I got it to work.

[Chris Miller]

Glad to hear it. If you find an answer helpful, remember to mark it as accepted to help the next people to find the thread.