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tsv-append concatenates multiple TSV files, similar to the Unix cat utility. It is header-aware, writing the header from only the first file. It also supports source tracking, adding a column indicating the original file to each row.

Concatenation with header support is useful when preparing data for traditional Unix utilities like sort and sed or applications that read a single file.

Source tracking is useful when creating long/narrow form tabular data. This format is used by many statistics and data mining packages. (See Wide & Long Data - Stanford University or Hadley Wickham's Tidy data for more info.)

In this scenario, files have been used to capture related data sets, the difference between data sets being a condition represented by the file. For example, results from different variants of an experiment might each be recorded in their own files. Retaining the source file as an output column preserves the condition represented by the file. The source values default to the file names, but this can be customized.

See the tsv-append reference for the complete list of options available.