How to input multiple bed files in plink

Question

[Ruocheng]

Hello,

I have 22 bed files from chromosome 1 to chromosome 22. How can I input them together one time in plink? Is there any command like --mbfile in GCTA that can take a list of the bed files.

chr1.bed
chr1.bim
chr1.fam
...
chr22.bed
chr22.bim
chr22.fam

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

[chrchang523]

The plink way of handling this is to create a merged dataset first: see the --merge-list command (and --pmerge-list in plink 2.0). Considerable effort has been spent on making plink capable of efficiently working with such large datasets.