concatenating grib (era40) files

[Henrique Barbosa]

Dear all,

Is it possible to combine different grib data files?
I mean, do something like:

cat file1 file2 file... > very_big_file

I have a set of "non-templatable" files which I would like to
access with a single ctl. Here's the situation:

binary file #1,  4 years of montly data
binary file #2,  6 years of montly data
....
binary file #n-1, 6 years of montly data
binary file #n, 2 years of montly data

Since I have different years in the same file, I can't use
templates. So either I split everything into yearly files,
or I join all of them into a single file.

To complicate even further, the grib files are from
ecmwf, so there are some junk bytes at the end of the
file.

Does anyone has a clever solution for this mess?

Thanks,
Henrique Barbosa