Split

I've removed advertising from most of this site and will eventually clean up the few pages where it remains.

While not terribly expensive to maintain, this does cost me something. If I don't get enough donations to cover that expense, I will be shutting the site down in early 2020.

If you found something useful today, please consider a small donation.

Some material is very old and may be incorrect today

© December 2003 Tony Lawrence

Breaks a file up into separate files, either by lines or bytes.

split -l1 /etc/passwd
 

will create a new file (xaa,xab, etc.) for each line of /etc/passwd.

Split is useful when you need to send a large file to someone whose isp enforces quotas on the size of mail files.

You can control the naming convention:

split -l 5000 bigfile foo.
 

will create 5000 line chunks named foo.aa, foo.ab etc. Some versions of split do that differently; check your man page.

To re-combine the files, use

cat foo.* > newbigfile
 

or, on a Windows machine,

copy FOO.* /B newbigfile /b
 

If you found something useful today, please consider a small donation.

Got something to add? Send me email.

---

Have you tried Searching this site?

This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more.

Contact us