I have a list of paths of all the shapefiles (around 50) to be merged. All of them are at the same projection and none of them is sized more than 110MB (shp+dbf). The combined size of merge (shp+dbf) is around 1.5GB. The arcpy code used is
arcpy.Merge_management(list_of_paths, output)
Problem: Merging all these files somehow creates an empty file (after around 15 minutes) with an error message:
arcgisscripting.ExecuteError: ERROR 999998: Unexpected Error.
Failed to execute (Merge).