Split very big xml file into little pieces with specific line number count

Question

This is how I did to extract the first 100000 lines from my big xml file (2gb):

head source.xml -n 100000 > part.xml

How can I keep splitting them to 100000 line (or specific file size chunks) until the whole file is separated?

Answer 1

You could use

split -l lines_per_file --additional-suffix=.xml source.xml part

This will read the file source.xml and split it into chunks of lines_per_file lines each. The result will be written into a series of files partaa.xml, partab.xml, partac.xml, ...

If you want to use another number of suffix characters, you can use the -a option to specify a number, eg. -a 1 to name the files parta.xml, partb.xml, partc.xml, ...

If you want to split to file size chunks instead of line counts, you can use -b size_in_bytes instead of -l lines_per_file.

Please note that the resulting files will most likely be invalid XML files (unless you happen to get one file in return, ie. your input had too few lines/bytes to get split).