How to divide file in unix

I tried using split but it is creating multiple chunks. Improve this question. Aravind Aravind 1, 9 9 gold badges 30 30 silver badges 44 44 bronze badges. Did you check split --help?

Yes i have checked it, but is creating multiple files which doesn't need to me. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Michael Mrozek Michael Mrozek I think that split is you best approach.

References man split man wc. Lucien Raven Lucien Raven 2 2 silver badges 3 3 bronze badges. This is how to split into a bunch of files with a fixed number of lines, or how to split evenly into a fixed number of files.

Is there a way to split into one line file and one file with everything else? That's what he was asking for; I couldn't find it in the man page — Michael Mrozek. I think I took a simplistic view on the question.

You solution is the best one in this case. Question wanted file into 2 parts, but at a specific line: split is the wrong tool for this job. This is a job for csplit : csplit -s infile will s ilently split infile , the first piece xx00 - up to but not including line and the second piece xx01 - the remaining lines.

Replace filename with the name of the large file you wish to split. Replace prefix with the name you wish to give the small output files. You can exclude [options] , or replace it with either of the following:. If you use the -l a lowercase L option, replace linenumber with the number of lines you'd like in each of the smaller files the default is 1, If you use the -b option, replace bytes with the number of bytes you'd like in each of the smaller files.

The split command will give each output file it creates the name prefix with an extension tacked to the end that indicates its order. By default, the split command adds aa to the first output file, proceeding through the alphabet to zz for subsequent files. If you do not specify a prefix, most systems use x. This will output three line files: xaa , xab , and xac. This will output six line files: segmentaa , segmentab , segmentac , segmentad , segmentae , and segmentaf.

This will output four 40KB files: segmentaa , segmentab , segmentac , and segmentad. To resolve such type of issues we can split the ISO into n number of pieces and will copy these pieces to remote sever and on the remote server we can merge these pieces into a single file using cat command,. Example is shown below:. As per the above output, it is confirm that integrity is maintained and we can also say split file are successfully restored to a single file.

While split on file the output files are with is extension. Like: split -l -b abc. Please note that in Darwin a Macintosh variant of BSD Unix , M is not accepted as a size suffix — it has to be m lowercase ; also G or g is not accepted while thousands of megabytes are.

Thanks for the bit about using cat to reassemble the original file. I could not find that anywhere else.