the empty quarter

Sometimes it is necessary to split a large file into several smaller ones, for example so that they fit on a CD or USB disk or can be attached to email. It’s very easy to do this from command line.

Suppose you have a file of 500 MiB called “large_file” and to split it into 5 files of 100 MiB each:

split --bytes=100m large_file large_file_part_

This will create 5 files with names as follows:

large_file_part_aa
large_file_part_ab
large_file_part_ac
large_file_part_ad
large_file_part_ae


The following command would then be used to join the parts back together:

cat large_file_part_* > large_file