How to pass hundreds of files from multiple subdirectories to cat?

Question

I have a directory full of subdirectories and each subdirectory has some text files inside of them (i.e. depth is 1).

I'd like to cat all these files (in no particular order) into one file:

cat file1 file2.... fileN >new.txt

Is there a bash shell one-liner that could list all the files inside of these directories and pass them to cat?

Answer 1

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cat

find will recursively search for files (-type f) and print their names as null-terminated strings (-print0).

xargs will read null terminated strings (-0) from stdin and pass them as arguments to cat

Answer 2

How about this?

find . -name '*.txt' -exec cat {} \; > concatenated.txt

Granted it calls cat a bunch of times rather than just once, but the effect is the same.