Splitting of large files is useful for electronic mail transmission (32KB is the recommended maximum size), to facilitate FTP file transfers over connections that experience fatal timeouts for large files, and for transferring files on personal computer floppy disks.
The split size is always forced internally to be a multiple of 512, which is the minimum block size on most current systems. By ensuring that the parts are multiples of file system blocksizes, corruption of the pieces through addition of padding garbage on some record-oriented file systems can be avoided.
For text files, where it is desirable to split at line boundaries, use split(1) instead.
The split pieces go into parts named like the argument file, but with the suffix -mmm (-001, -002, etc.).
If no files are specified, then stdin is read and split, and the output pieces are named stdin-001, stdin-002, etc.
On IBM PC DOS and DEC VMS systems, where only a single period is allowed in a filename, the suffix is changed to .mmm and it replaces any file extension present in the filename.
Letter case is ignored in option names: -H and -h are equivalent.
The integer value nnn may be optionally followed by a multiplier suffix: K(kilo), M(mega), G(giga), T(tera), P(peta), or E(exa). These correspond to powers of the computer unit 1024, rather than the usual 1000 of the metric system.
If this size option is omitted, then 1423K is assumed; this peculiar number is the size of an IBM PC 3.5in high-density floppy disk, which is a common file transfer medium.
Nelson H. F. Beebe Center for Scientific Computing University of Utah Department of Mathematics, 322 INSCC 155 S 1400 E RM 233 Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090 USA Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] (Internet) WWW URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe FAX: +1 801 585 1640, +1 801 581 4148 Tel: +1 801 581 5254