# Merge.taxsummary crash
**URL:** https://forum.mothur.org/t/merge-taxsummary-crash/20106
**Category:** mothur bugs
**Created:** [September 16, 2019, 8:33pm UTC](https://forum.mothur.org/t/merge-taxsummary-crash/20106 "2019-09-16T20:33:58Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Grothjan](https://forum.mothur.org/u/Grothjan)
#### Post date: [September 16, 2019, 8:33pm UTC](https://forum.mothur.org/t/merge-taxsummary-crash/20106/1 "2019-09-16T20:33:58Z")
Hi all,
When I am merging tax summary files with Merge.taxsummary my instance of mothur crashes (segmentation fault 11). However, the command only crashes when I have the “simple” flag enabled upon generating the initial tax summary files. There is no crash if the default flags are kept.
- Jake
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### Author:  [@westcott](https://forum.mothur.org/u/westcott)
#### Post date: [September 19, 2019, 3:15pm UTC](https://forum.mothur.org/t/merge-taxsummary-crash/20106/2 "2019-09-19T15:15:09Z")
Hi Jake,
Thanks for reporting this issue. The merge.taxsummary command was not designed to work with the simple format. I added the addition of a format parameter for merge.taxsummary to our list of feature requests. You can follow the progress here, [https://github.com/mothur/mothur/issues/659](https://github.com/mothur/mothur/issues/659). As a workaround you can combine the taxonomy files before summarizing. Here’s how:
mothur \> merge.files(input=taxonomyFile1-taxonomyFile2…-taxonomyFileN, output=complete.taxonomy) - combine the taxonomy files
mothur \> summary.tax(taxonomy=complete.taxonomy, output=simple) - summarize complete taxonomy in simple format
Kindly,
Sarah
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### Author:  [@Grothjan](https://forum.mothur.org/u/Grothjan)
#### Post date: [September 25, 2019, 9:36pm UTC](https://forum.mothur.org/t/merge-taxsummary-crash/20106/3 "2019-09-25T21:36:45Z")
Excellent! That’s a fine workaround for the time being. Thanks for your help!
- Jake
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### Author:  [@system](https://forum.mothur.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2019, 9:36pm UTC](https://forum.mothur.org/t/merge-taxsummary-crash/20106/4 "2019-10-05T21:36:47Z")
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