Linux How To Split And Join Files
If you need to move around large files you might find it useful to be able to both split and join files. You can split different types of files including binary data files ( executables, videos, music, text, etc. ).
Quick Answer: On Linux you can split and join files with these commands:
split -b 1M test.mp4 # split
cat x* > test.mp4 # join / combine
Keep reading for more details and examples.
We are going to be using the file rabbitmq-server-generic-unix-3.8.9.tar for most of the examples on this page.
How to Split Files on Linux
You can split a file into 1M chunks like this:
split -b 1M rabbitmq-server-generic-unix-3.8.9.tar
This will result in a bunch of 1M files that look like this:
xaa xab xac xad xae xaf xag xah xai xaj xak xal xam xan xao xap
You could choose to provide a prefix for each split file. Just specify it as another parameter.
split -b 1M rabbitmq-server-generic-unix-3.8.9.tar test_
This will result in files that look like this:
test_aa test_ab test_ac test_ad test_ae test_af test_ag test_ah test_ai test_aj test_ak test_al test_am test_an test_ao test_ap
Make sure to actually check which files were generated and don’t assume anything. You will want to keep track of these so that you can successfully recombine them later.
How to Join Files on Linux
Joining files back together is relatively easy.
If you didn’t specify a prefix you could join all of the files together like this:
cat x* > rabbitmq-server-generic-unix-3.8.9.tar
If you specified a prefix you could just do the following:
cat test_* > rabbitmq-server-generic-unix-3.8.9.tar
Just make sure that you match the actual files that you are trying to combine. It is easy to match unrelated files or to miss some of the files that you need to combine.
You could just combine everything in the current directory if you want. That would actually workout very well if you organize your files this way. Use the following command.
cat * > rabbitmq-server-generic-unix-3.8.9.tar