Have you ever been in the position where you needed to transfer a very big file to another computer but had to split that in more pieces so that you can actually copy it ? This would have definately happened to you if you use a FAT32 formatted disk drive that doesn’t allow for files larger than 4GBs. So, what happens if you want to transfer a file that is 8GBs ?
The Unix Split Command
Luckily, the GNU tools are there to save us. There is a unix tool called split that can be used for such a process. Let’s suppose(for the sake of simplicity) that we want to split a 10KB file to smaller pieces. We use this command to split the file to chunks of 2kb and thus we get 5 new files.
thought@thought:~/Desktop/pieces$ split -b 2k /home/thought/Desktop/example /home/thought/Desktop/pieces/example
This command will split the file named example to 5 smaller pieces and then put these pieces to the folder /home/though/Desktop/pieces/ under the prefix “example”. Therefore, we will be getting 5 new files named like:
exampleaa exampleab exampleac examplead exampleae
In order to reunite these files back to one single file, after we copy them, we execute the command :
thought@thought:~/Desktop/pieces$ cat examplea* > merged
This will merge all our files to the standard output of the shell and forward it to a new file named merged.
Hope this was helpful for you !
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