Split

© 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
 

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