Mandalika's scratchpad: Solaris: Tip - Splitting and Merging Files

Mandalika's scratchpad: Solaris: Tip - Splitting and Merging Files in Solaris

Sometimes we may have to split a large file into several small files before transfering 'em to another host. Later we can assemble these small files to re-create the original large file at the destination.

Splitting can be done on any file type, including binary files, with the help of split utility of Solaris. Read the man page of split, for all the available options. In the example, we will be using the following options to split one 11M file into several 2M files.

Syntax:
split [-b nm] [file [name]]

where:
-b nm suggests splitting a file into pieces of size nMB, with the name to be used for each of the files resulting from the split operation.

split will append something like "aa", "ab", etc., to make the resulting file names unique and in ascending sort order.

eg., 1. Splitting a large file

% ls -lh *.zip
-rw-r--r--   1 giri     other        11M Jun 30 12:10 src.zip

% split -b 3m src.zip source

% ls -lh source*
-rw-rw-r--   1 giri     other       3.0M Jun 30 17:18 sourceaa
-rw-rw-r--   1 giri     other       3.0M Jun 30 17:18 sourceab
-rw-rw-r--   1 giri     other       3.0M Jun 30 17:18 sourceac
-rw-rw-r--   1 giri     other       2.3M Jun 30 17:18 sourcead