How to split large files in small parts

How to split large files in small parts

When one have an 8GB data and wants to break the data in smaller parts than the following method can be used.

Using split & cat command we can easily do this:

Let say you have an image & its too big (10 MB). All I do is :

split --bytes=1M /path/to/image/image.jpg /path/to/image/prefixForNewImagePieces

 

To put it together use cat:

cat prefixFiles* > newimage.jpg

Assuming that you are inside the folder where the image is:

split --bytes=1M myimage.jpg new

If the image is inside a directory called images you can also do this:

split --bytes=1M images/myimage.jpg new

If the image is inside the directory/home/cyrex/images you can do this :

split --bytes=1M /home/cyrex/images/myimage.jpg new

(In all the cases above it will split myimage.jpg in 1MB pieces & prefix the name of the pieces with the word new. So they would look like newaa, newab, newac, newad.....)

If you are splitting a text file & want to split it by lines you can do this:

split -l 1000 book.txt new

Than  merge them:

cat new* > newimage.jpg

You can even change the size of the split pieces. Just change the part that says

--bytes=1M to --bytes=1K for 1kilobyte or 1G for giga, or another number like --bytes=4K for 4KB pieces.