#228 Files

Split a text file into parts with simple shell utilities.

Notes

Split By Row Count

Given a text file with many rows, split it into multiple smaller files n lines in length

Simple solution is to use the split utility e.g.

cd example1
split -l 100 ../countries.csv part-

This produces three files with a maximum of 100 lines in each file:

$ wc -l *
     100 part-aa
     100 part-ab
      49 part-ac
     249 total

However this was a CSV file, so it contains a header that might be good to strip first. The split accepts piped data, so can first trim the file with tail:

cd example2
tail -n +2 ../countries.csv | split -l 100 - part-
wc -l *
     100 part-aa
     100 part-ab
      48 part-ac
     248 total

Credits and References

• man split(1)
• man tail(1)
• How to Split Large Text File into Multiple *.txt Files
• Split text file into smaller multiple text file using command line - stackoverflow
• How can I remove the first line of a text file using bash/sed script?