Editing Split (Unix) (section)

==Usage==
The command-[[syntax]] is:
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
 split [OPTION] [INPUT [PREFIX]]
</syntaxhighlight>

The default behavior of <code>split</code> is to generate output files of a fixed size, default 1000 lines.  The files are named by appending ''aa'', ''ab'', ''ac'', etc. to ''output filename''.  If ''output filename'' is not given, the default filename of ''x'' is used, for example, ''xaa'', ''xab'', etc.  When a hyphen (''-'') is used instead of ''input filename'', data is derived from [[standard input]]. The files are typically rejoined using a utility such as [[cat (Unix)|cat]].

Additional program options permit a maximum character count (instead of a line count), a maximum line length, how many incrementing characters in generated filenames, and whether to use letters or digits.

=== Split file into pieces ===
Create a file named "<code>myfile.txt</code>" with exactly 3,000 lines of data:
<syntaxhighlight lang="console">
$ head -3000 < /dev/urandom > myfile.txt
</syntaxhighlight>

Now, use the <code>split</code> command to break this file into pieces (note: unless otherwise specified, <code>split</code> will break the file into 1,000-line files):
<syntaxhighlight lang="console">
$ split myfile.txt
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 761K Jun 16 18:17 myfile.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 242K Jun 16 18:17 xaa
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 263K Jun 16 18:17 xab
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 256K Jun 16 18:17 xac
$ wc --lines xa*
  1000 xaa
  1000 xab
  1000 xac
  3000 total
</syntaxhighlight>
As seen above, the <code>split</code> command has broken the original file (keeping the original intact) into three, equal in number of lines (i.e., 1,000), files: <code>xaa</code>, <code>xab</code>, and <code>xac</code>.