tcatn: Concatenates multiple tables
tcatn is a tool for concatenating a number of tables
one after the other. Each table can be manipulated separately
prior to the concatenatation.
If you have two tables T1 and T2 which contain similar columns, and you
want to treat them as a single table, you can use tcatn
to produce a new table whose metadata (row headings etc) comes from T1
and whose data consists of all the rows of T1 followed by all the rows of T2.
For this concatenation to make sense, each column of T1 must be
compatible with the corresponding column of T2 - they must have
compatible types and, presumably, meanings.
If this is not the case for the tables that you wish to concatenate,
for instance the columns are in different orders, or the units
differ between a column in T1 and its opposite number in T2,
you can use the icmd1 and/or icmd2
parameters to manipulate the input tables so that the
column sequences are compatible. See Appendix B.29.2 for
some examples.
If the tables are similar to each other
(same format, same columns, same preprocessing stages required if any),
you may find it easier to use tcat instead.