Concatenate files based on numeric sort of name substring in awk w/o header - bash

Question

I am interested in concatenate many files together based on the numeric number and also remove the first line.
e.g. chr1_smallfiles then chr2_smallfiles then chr3_smallfiles.... etc (each without the header)
Note that chr10_smallfiles needs to come after chr9_smallfiles -- that is, this needs to be numeric sort order.
When separate the two command awk and ls -v1, each does the job properly, but when put them together, it doesn't work. Please help thanks!
awk 'FNR>1' | ls -v1 chr*_smallfiles > bigfile

Answer 1

The issue is with the way that you're trying to pass the list of files to awk. At the moment, you're piping the output of awk to ls, which makes no sense.
Bear in mind that, as mentioned in the comments, ls is a tool for interactive use, and in general its output shouldn't be parsed.
If sorting weren't an issue, you could just use:
awk 'FNR > 1' chr*_smallfiles > bigfile
The shell will expand the glob chr*_smallfiles into a list of files, which are passed as arguments to awk. For each filename argument, all but the first line will be printed.
Since you want to sort the files, things aren't quite so simple. If you're sure the full range of files exist, just replace chr*_smallfiles with chr{1..99}_smallfiles in the original command.
Using some Bash-specific and GNU sort features, you can also achieve the sorting like this:
printf '%s\0' chr*_smallfiles | sort -z -n -k1.4 | xargs -0 awk 'FNR > 1' > bigfile
printf '%s\0' prints each filename followed by a null-byte
sort -z sorts records separated by null-bytes
-n -k1.4 does a numeric sort, starting from the 4th character (the numeric part of the filename)
xargs -0 passes the sorted, null-separated output as arguments to awk
Otherwise, if you want to go through the files in numerical order, and you're not sure whether all the files exist, then you can use a shell loop (although it'll be significantly slower than a single awk invocation):
for file in chr{1..99}_smallfiles; do # 99 is the maximum file number
[ -f "$file" ] || continue # skip missing files
awk 'FNR > 1' "$file"
done > bigfile

Answer 2

You can also use tail to concatenate all the files without header
tail -q -n+2 chr*_smallfiles > bigfile
In case you want to concatenate the files in a natural sort order as described in your quesition, you can pipe the result of ls -v1 to xargs using
ls -v1 chr*_smallfiles | xargs -d $'\n' tail -q -n+2 > bigfile
(Thanks to Charles Duffy) xargs -d $'\n' sets the delimiter to a newline \n in case the filename contains white spaces or quote characters

Answer 3

Using a bash 4 associative array to extract only the numeric substring of each filename; sort those individually; and then retrieve and concatenate the full names in the resulting order:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
case $BASH_VERSION in ''|[123].*) echo "Requires bash 4.0 or newer" >&2; exit 1;; esac
# when this is done, you'll have something like:
# files=( [1]=chr_smallfiles1.txt
# [10]=chr_smallfiles10.txt
# [9]=chr_smallfiles9.txt )
declare -A files=( )
for f in chr*_smallfiles.txt; do
files[${f//[![:digit:]]/}]=$f
done
# now, emit those indexes (1, 10, 9) to "sort -n -z" to sort them as numbers
# then read those numbers, look up the filenames associated, and pass to awk.
while read -r -d '' key; do
awk 'FNR > 1' <"${files[$key]}"
done < <(printf '%s\0' "${!files[#]}" | sort -n -z) >bigfile

Answer 4

You can do with a for loop like below, which is working for me:-
for file in chr*_smallfiles
do
tail +2 "$file" >> bigfile
done
How will it work? For loop read all the files from current directory with wild chard character * chr*_smallfiles and assign the file name to variable file and tail +2 $file will output all the lines of that file except the first line and append in file bigfile. So finally all files will be merged (accept the first line of each file) into one i.e. file bigfile.

Answer 5

Just for completeness, how about a sed solution?
for file in chr*_smallfiles
do
sed -n '2,$p' $file >> bigfile
done
Hope it helps!