Emile van Sebille asked: >Doesn't tar do exactly this? where "this" was defined by Thomas Duterme to mean: >> for x in os.listdir('.'): >> os.system('cat '+x+' >> mylargefile) No, tar doesn't do that because it adds data needed to extract each file. On the other hand, cat does: cat * > mylargefile though this won't read the dotfiles. Andrew dalke at acm.org