How to combine several small MPG movies into larger ones?

First of all, this method only describes a way to combine already playable MPEG movies, and not sections which could come from individual messages in the newsgroup.
As far as I know, every 'frame' in an MPEG movie holds all the information needed to play that frame. With that in mind, we should be able to concatenate different MPG's into larger ones, no mather what your operating system is.
When using DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x or Windows NT, you could use the command line utility COPY.
(On unix you could use similar copy commands like cp or cat)
The syntax is as follows:

the parameters:
 
/B Tells the COPY program it should do a binary copy instead of an ascii (text) one.
file1+file2+....fileX The different MPG's you whish to combine 
Make sure you put them in the proper order; file 1 will be the first one, file2 the second, and so on. Don't put spaces in between the filenames and the + (plus) sign.
BIG.MPG The resulting MPG movie
There can be a problem when typing all of this on the command line, especially when combining MPEG files like the recent hr-canalplus-xxx.mpg files. In DOS and Windows the number of characters of the keyboard input buffer is limited. And repeating the whole filename every time is at least time-consuming.
Usually I copy the files I whish to combine to a temporary directory (map, folder) and rename them. There are plenty of freeware utilities available for automating the renaming of large number of files. Have a look at NoNags for that matter.
Doing so, you don't need to rename them with the MPG extention, since you are only going to use these temporary files as a source for the resulting large movie.
Maybe an example can clarify all of this a bit more:

Let's say I have the following movies which I want to combine into 1 movie called CPLUS02X.MPG
 
original filenames
hr-canalplus-020.mpg 
hr-canalplus-021.mpg 
hr-canalplus-022.mpg 
hr-canalplus-023.mpg 
hr-canalplus-024.mpg 
hr-canalplus-025.mpg 
hr-canalplus-026.mpg 
hr-canalplus-027.mpg 
hr-canalplus-028.mpg 
hr-canalplus-029.mpg		 rename to
0 
1 
2 
3 
4 
5 
6 
7 
8 
9
After renaming the files, I would type on the command prompt:
 

Then, I would delete the files 0 to 9 and move the file cplus02x.mpg to another directory.
 
 
 
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