Nearly all email providers include some method for managing contacts information, including the ability to import and export contacts in the vCard (.vcf file extension) or CardDAV format. If you are required to import contacts to a new email provider using a single .vcf file, but your export contained a single .vcf file for each contact, then the simplest methods for converting many .vcf files into a single, combined .vcf file is as follows:
On Linux:
First, download your individual contact files in vCard (.vcf) file format to your home directory. If the download was a zip file, extract the contents to a new temporary directory; in the example command line code below, we have placed them in a directory named ‘contacts’, and this folder exists in the home directory of the user.
Next, we will run a command using a terminal window. The ‘cat’ command concatenates files together. The ‘>’ symbol is a parameter of the ‘cat’ command which specifies which set of files are being concatenated (on the left-hand side of the symbol), and which new file to store the concatenated files to (on the right-hand side of the symbol). In this example, we are concatenating all files (hence the ‘*’ operator) which end in ‘.vcf’ within our ‘contacts’ directory into a new file we decided to name ‘all_contacts.vcf’:
cat ~/contacts/*.vcf > all_contacts.vcfNow we can use the new ‘all_contacts.vcf’ file to upload existing contacts to the new email provider or software tool which expects all contacts to be contained in a single file.
On MacOS:
Follow the same steps as “On Linux” above. The MacOS Terminal tool works largely the same as a Linux terminal, and shares many of the same command line tools as Linux.
On Windows:
First, download your individual contact files in vCard (.vcf) file format to your home directory. If the download was a zip file, extract the contents to a new temporary directory; in the example command line code below, we have placed them in a directory named ‘contacts’, and this folder exists in the home directory of the user.
Next, we will run a command using a terminal window. The ‘copy’ command concatenates files together. In this example, we are concatenating all files (hence the ‘*’ operator) which end in ‘.vcf’ within our C:\Users subdirectory into a new file we decided to name ‘all_contacts.vcf’:
copy C:\Users\<your-username>\Downloads\contacts\*.vcf all_contacts.vcfNOTE: Be sure to replace the <your-username> part of the command above with your actual username in Windows.
Now we can use the new ‘all_contacts.vcf’ file to upload existing contacts to the new email provider or software tool which expects all contacts to be contained in a single file.
Remember, your computer system is a powerful tool that likely doesn’t require more software for you to use it efficiently. You just need to learn more about how to use it to accomplish computational tasks more efficiently!