Split Command in Unix / Linux:
This utility / command in unix or linux helps to split the file into two or more files. We have multiple options to use the command as per our needs.
Syntax :
split [filename] [INPUT [PREFIX] ]
where
[filename] is the name of file we want to split.
[INPUT [PREFIX]] is optional prefix for the splited files.
for example if we have file name called “abc” then usually we will keep Prefix as “abc” so that it can be divided into files are called abc0 , abc1, abc2 … abc[N]
OPTIONAL
-a, --suffix-length=N use suffixes of length N (default 2) -b, --bytes=SIZE put SIZE bytes per output file -C, --line-bytes=SIZE put at most SIZE bytes of lines per output file -d, --numeric-suffixes use numeric suffixes instead of alphabetic -l, --lines=NUMBER put NUMBER lines per output file --verbose print a diagnostic just before each output file is opened
Examples 1 :
Lets create a file which will contain 100 lines using following command
for i in {1..100} ; do echo "This is line number $i ">>test-split.txt; done
bash-4.1$ ls test-split.txt
Now split the file into 10 files each will contain
split -l 10 test-split.txt test-split.txt -d
Note: with -d option each file will have digit in suffix as shown below but if the number of files could go beyond 99 or more than 2 diget number we can us -a3 or -aN option for suffix length where N is length of suffix (default is -a2)
therefore file is split into 10 as shown below
bash-4.1$ ls test-split.txt test-split.txt00 test-split.txt01 test-split.txt02 test-split.txt03 test-split.txt04 test-split.txt05 test-split.txt06 test-split.txt07 test-split.txt08 test-split.txt09
Example 2.
Lets create a bigger file of 10M and split it with respect to size in MB.
bash-4.1$ ls -ltrh total 10M -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 10M Jul 20 15:13 test-split.txt
Now we split this 10M file into 10 equal size files of 1M appx using following command.
bash-4.1$ split -b 1M test-split.txt test-split.txt -d
File have been splited into 10 files as show below
bash-4.1$ ls -ltrh total 20M -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 10M Jul 20 15:13 test-split.txt -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 1.0M Jul 20 15:17 test-split.txt00 -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 1.0M Jul 20 15:17 test-split.txt01 -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 1.0M Jul 20 15:17 test-split.txt02 -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 1.0M Jul 20 15:17 test-split.txt03 -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 1.0M Jul 20 15:17 test-split.txt04 -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 1.0M Jul 20 15:17 test-split.txt05 -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 1.0M Jul 20 15:17 test-split.txt06 -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 1.0M Jul 20 15:17 test-split.txt07 -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 1.0M Jul 20 15:17 test-split.txt08 -rw-r-----. 1 rmn users 927K Jul 20 15:17 test-split.txt09
If you want to split the file in bytes then command will be as followed
bash-4.1$ split -b1000 test-split.txt test-split.txt -d
Finally how to join all back to make one single file ? it is very simple just use cat command line utility as shown belown
bash-4.1$ cat test-split.txt00 test-split.txt01 test-split.txt02 test-split.txt03 test-split.txt04 test-split.txt05 test-split.txt06 test-split.txt07 test-split.txt08 test-split.txt09 >> test-split.txt
Thanks for reading article I hope you liked it .. Keep visiting and don’t forget to give feedback
