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What I am looking for is a way to recombine split files without using cat. Is there such a beast?

It could run on Linux or Windows or Mac OS.

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Out of pure interest: Why not use cat on OS X / Linux? It's specifically made for concatenating split files. Or is it the GUI you're looking for? –  slhck Jul 12 '11 at 18:43
@slhck - cat works great: but I'm still looking for a non-commandline edition - hence the "GUI" part of my inquiry :) ..it'd be really nice to be able to drop a batch of files into a window, order them as desired, then come back when it's done –  warren Jul 12 '11 at 18:51
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3 Answers

HJSplit allows users to split and join files. It comes with its own graphical interface, and has versions for Windows and Linux. This page on the HJSplit website shows alternatives for Macs, which are considered to be compatible with HJSplit.

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I can't figure out how to give the app a list of arbitrary files - it seems to only understand its own split format :( –  warren Jul 12 '11 at 19:25
AFAIK, it usually joins files that came from the same filename (e.g., "archive.zip.001," "archive.zip.002," etc. to be joined into "archive.zip"). That's why it provides a way to compute the checksum as well, to check the split files' integrity before re-combining them into one whole file. –  Isxek Jul 12 '11 at 19:31
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Also, There is this program that concatenate audio and video.

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an arbitrary type of file list: anything that may have been made with split (see question) –  warren Jul 12 '11 at 19:26
@warren I edited my post please recheck. –  raym0nd Jul 12 '11 at 19:40
seems to have the same limitations as @lsxek's 'HJSplit' :( –  warren Jul 13 '11 at 0:58
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You need zenity sudo apt-get install zenity (for ubuntu/debian users and similar) for this to work, but there are similar programs, to wrap GUI-actions in a script, (i.e.: dialog).

This script asks the user for a file (or a group of files) from a first directory in a GUI-file-selection-dialog, and stores the file names in the variable in1, similar for in2, then asks the user in a GUI-dialog for a target file (name and dir), where to cat the result. The last line in the script actually uses cat to cat the files together.

# cat multiple files from 2 directories, select them by gui
# (c) GPLv3
in1=$(zenity --file-selection --multiple)
in2=$(zenity --file-selection --multiple) 
cat ${in1//|/ }  ${in2//|/ } > $out 

Save the script, make it executable, and, depending on your desktop environment, you may link it with an icon on your desktop, or make a link in the application menu.

It will work for multiple selections in two directories, but you have to change it for 3 or more directories. You could modify it, to ask for the number of directories/files before selecting them.

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so - this is still a command-line app that just happens to wrap around cat with this particular example? –  warren Jul 21 '11 at 18:44
Well - you save it, and make a starter in your panel, or combine a hotkey to it. Shall I explain how to move it into the path (sudo) or how to set the path to include a directory where you have write access. You can start OpenOffice, Gimp, Firefox - every command from the commandline. That doesn't make it a command line app. A command line app would run in the command line, work without X. –  user unknown Jul 21 '11 at 19:56
I'm not seeing how this solves the problem. Perhaps you could edit your answer to be a bit more detailed about how to actually concatenate files from the GUI using this method? –  nhinkle Jul 21 '11 at 22:37
Thanks for updating your question - the instructions are now much more clear, and I can see how it would actually provide a GUI. Much better now. –  nhinkle Aug 4 '11 at 18:53
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