Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Specifying a filename prefix for the split files

All the previous split filenames start with x. If we are splitting more than one file, we'll want to name the pieces, so it's obvious which goes with which. We can use our own filename prefix by providing a prefix as the last argument.

Let's run the previous command with the split_file prefix:

$ split -b 10k data.file -d -a 4 split_file
$ ls
data.file       split_file0002  split_file0005  split_file0008
strtok.c
split_file0000  split_file0003  split_file0006  split_file0009
split_file0001  split_file0004  split_file0007

To split files based on the number of lines in each split rather than chunk size, use this:

-l no_of_lines:
 # Split into files of 10 lines each.
 $ split -l 10 data.file 

The csplit ...