I have about 1000 shapefiles that I will be merging into one large shapefile. I am not interested in the attribute information, only the location. I was thinking I should try to condense the files before merging by stripping out all the fields except the required ones and them merging them all together, All the files should be polygons but a few non polygons may creep in so a check for file type would probably be nice. (I think I can code this requirement on my own).
Right now all the files are spread out in multiple directories but I have the file names and directory path listed in a txt file. I would want to copy all these files to a single location, delete the unnecessary fields and then merge. I want to do this all at once instead of each file individually. I know how to code this individually but am unsure how to accomplish this with such a large volume of data. Ideas anyone?
ver. ArcGIS 10.2.1 Advanced
