How do I break a large, +4GB file into smaller files of about 500MB each.
And how do I re-assemble them again to get the original file?
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Sign up to join this communityHow do I break a large, +4GB file into smaller files of about 500MB each.
And how do I re-assemble them again to get the original file?
You can use split and cat.
For example something like
$ split --bytes 500M --numeric-suffixes --suffix-length=3 foo foo.
(where the input filename is foo
and the last argument is the output prefix). This will create files like foo.000 foo.001
...
The same command with short options:
$ split -b 100k -d -a 3 foo foo
You can also specify "--line-bytes" if you wish it to split on line boundaries instead of just exact number of bytes.
For re-assembling the generated pieces again you can use e.g.:
$ cat foo.* > foo_2
(assuming that the shell sorts the results of shell globbing - and the number of parts does not exceed the system dependent limit of arguments)
You can compare the result via:
$ cmp foo foo_2
$ echo $?
(which should output 0)
Alternatively, you can use a combination of find/sort/xargs to re-assemble the pieces:
$ find -maxdepth 1 -type f -name 'foo.*' | sort | xargs cat > foo_3
cat foo.{000..NNN}
where NNN
is the last expected piece. That way you get an error message if one of the pieces is missing. But note that -d
to get numeric suffixes is specific to GNU split; on other platforms you have to make do with foo.aaa
, foo.aab
, etc.
Oct 17, 2010 at 11:16
split
, KB = 1000, K = 1024, MB = 1000*1000, M = 1024*1024 etc.
rar
and 7zip
are often used in making such splits easier to reassemble cross-platform
You can also do this with Archive Manager if you prefer a GUI. Look under 'Save->Other Options->Split into volumes of'.