On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 11:12 PM, David Livesay <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > ls notes-* | [??] | cat > notes Ok, a bit of clarification here. UNIX is not DOS; it is the *shell*, not the individual commands like ls, that is responsible for expanding wildcards. The shell expands notes-* into individual files and passes them all to the command; so your ls command above is essentially a glorified echo command. cat notes-* will do what you want. However, there are cases where you want to take a list of filenames (or other strings) in one-per-line form and turn them into arguments to a single command; that's what the xargs (cross-arguments) command is for: ls -1 notes-* | xargs cat will also do the right thing. -- Mark J. Reed <[log in to unmask]>