The following uses the <> operator to read all the files passed on the command line in a line at a time fashion. Each value is appended to a list in memory and then joined and printed when the internal file handle used by the diamond operator hits an end of file (see the description of eof in perlop for details). 

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @line;
while (<>) {
    chomp;
    push @line, "$_";
} continue {
    if (eof) {
        print join("\t", @line), "\n";
        @line = ();
        close ARGV;
    }
}

[download]
Update: Simplified. No need for an array or any fancy joining! 
while (<>) {
    chomp;
    if (eof) {print "$_\n"}
    else {print "$_\t"}
}

[download]

The order that the files are appended is taken from the order in which they are listed in @ARGV. This can be sorted before the files are processed.

In reply to Re: printing contents of small files into one larger one by inman
in thread printing contents of small files into one larger one by Angharad

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