Combining files

Occasionally, you may want to combine a number of files into a single document. For example, you may have a table of data stored in one file and want to add the table to another file. You can read in the contents of a file after the line that holds the cursor. The r stands for Read; it reads the contents of a file to be added to the current file after the line indicated by the cursor.

The same sort of command can be used to combine the chapters of a document into a single file. For example,

:r chapter1
G
:r chapter2
G
:r chapter3

will read in chapters that are stored in separate files. Notice that we had to use G commands to go to the end of the file after each read operation, so that the next input file would be added to the end of the text.