Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

How to do it...

The split command was created to split files. It accepts a filename as an argument and creates a set of smaller files in which the first part of the original file is in the alphabetically first new file, the next set in the alphabetically next file, and so on.

For example, a 100 KB file can be divided into smaller files of 10k each by specifying the split size. The split command supports M for MB, G for GB, c for byte, and w for word.

$ split -b 10k data.file
$ ls
data.file  xaa  xab  xac  xad  xae  xaf  xag  xah  xai  xaj

The preceding code will split data.file into ten files of 10k each. The new files are named xab, xac, xad, and so on. By default, split uses alphabetic suffixes. To use numeric suffixes, use the -d argument. It ...