Bash - split file into parts (by size)

In this short article, we would like to show how to split file into parts in Bash.

Quick solution:

split -b 10MB big_file.ext part_file.ext.

Where:

• -b 10MB means max size of single part,
• big_file.ext means path to input file that we want to split,
• part_file.ext. means prefix-path of output files
  (where command generates files as: part.ext.aa, part.ext.ab, part.ext.ac, ...).

Practical example

Let's suppose we have database backup as file that we want to split into multiple 10MB parts.

Example command:

split -b 10MB backup/batabase.sql backup/part.sql.

Example result:

Splitting input stream

Example command:

cat /path/to/somewhere.ext | split -b 10MB - /path/to/part.sql.

Where - means stdin usage with split command.

See also

1. Bash - join multiple files

References

1. split(1) - Linux manual page
2. Standard streams - Wikipedia