Sometimes files are egregiously large and are downright unmanageable to look at. The split command can be used to break large files into smaller components, while keeping the original file intact.

Some split options include capping at a line number (shown with the -l5 flag, where there are 5 max lines per file created), specifying the output name prefix (shown as newname_), and made verbose, which shows the names of the newly created files.

$ split -l5 example_file newname_ --verbose
creating file 'new_aa'
creating file 'new_ab'
creating file 'new_ac'
creating file 'new_ad'
creating file 'new_ae'

There are other options, too. -d will give the new files a numeric suffix, such as 00, instead of aa. Byte sizes can be specified following the pattern in the table, where the number is what you want the max file size to be. Alternatively, you can split it into a set number of chunks with something like -n5 (where it’d be broken into 5 chunks).

Example flags for split byte sizes

| Flag | Max File Size | |———-|——————-| |-b2000000 | 2000000 bytes | |-b 50K | 50 kilobytes (KB) | |-b 50M | 50 megabytes (MB) | |-b 1G | 1 gigabyte (GB) |