an example: to tail all the files in the current directory, you can do tail *, also: for i in *; do tail $i;done you can do (in bash): help for and it gives you: for: for NAME [in WORDS ... ;] do COMMANDS; done The `for' loop executes a sequence of commands for each member in a list of items. If `in WORDS ...;' is not present, then `in "$@"' is assumed. For each element in WORDS, NAME is set to that element, and the COMMANDS are executed. so, for i in *.txt;do cat "testing" >>$i;done would append "Testing" to the files in the current directory ending with .txt. hope this helps.