Linux split Command: Split Large Files into Smaller Parts

The split command in Linux (split) is used to split large files into n-smaller files. The output files are generated according to the number of lines in the input file. The default is to split the file every 1000 lines. The output file names follow the pattern fileaa fileab fileac, and so on. You can specify a suffix for the output file.

The most common option is:

• -n:             Where n is the number of lines that will split the input file;
• -b bytes:  Split the file into a defined number of bytes.

In this example the supermarket list file is split into 4 files with suffix "lista" with two lines each:

$ split -2 supermercado lista$ ls -l-rw-rw-r-- 1 ec2-user ec2-user      14 set 13 09:08 listaaa-rw-rw-r-- 1 ec2-user ec2-user      13 set 13 09:08 listaab-rw-rw-r-- 1 ec2-user ec2-user      14 set 13 09:08 listaac-rw-rw-r-- 1 ec2-user ec2-user      12 set 13 09:08 listaad-rw-rw-r-- 1 ec2-user ec2-user      53 set 13 08:40 supermercado

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