split large file with … split.

Posted on October 19, 2016  •  1 minutes  • 95 words  •  Suggest Changes

A small useful hack (/use of) when you need to cut a large (huge) file in pieces to move it to tapes (2.5 Tb), cd (800 Mb), … . Here comes split !

split -b 2T full_data.tar.gz "data.tar.gz.part"

This will split the full_data.tar.gz (+6 Tb) in pieces of 2Tb each, each part will be named data.tar.gz.part*

• is an option (see split -help), but default is double letter (aa, ab, ac, …., zz)

now, to join them together again, you can join them using cat

cat data.tar.gz* > full_data.tar.gz

Go forth and split those large files!