Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Split Files Into Smaller Files

By  on  

As fast as internet connections have gotten over the years, it seems the size of files we want to share has grown faster.  Whether it's archive (ZIP), video, or any other host of potentially large file types, it's still tricky to put these large files somewhere to download since many storage providers have file size limits.

Splitting archive and other files into small pieces is actually quite easy with the split utility.  By using split to chunk files apart, and cat to put them back together, we can skirt maximum file size limitations and fears of connection problems messing up large file downloads:

split -b 1m Turok.zip TUR

The example above splits a ZIP file into 1MB chunks with a file name prefix of TUR.  To put them back together we'll use cat:

cat TUR* > TurokRebuilt.zip

The chunked files are properly rebuilt!

Split Files

I've seen this practice used for years -- ever since my bad boy days of pirating applications and games.  Splitting and reassembling files seemed like magic back then -- little did I know how easy it was!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Elegant Overflow with CSS Ellipsis

    Overflow with text is always a big issue, especially in a programmatic environment. There's always only so much space but variable content to add into that space. I was recently working on a table for displaying user information and noticed that longer strings were...

  • By
    Submit Button Enabling

    "Enabling" you ask? Yes. We all know how to disable the submit upon form submission and the reasons for doing so, but what about re-enabling the submit button after an allotted amount of time. After all, what if the user presses the "stop"...

Discussion

  1. Kristaps

    Old days when you needed to split archives to fit them in multiple floppies. Uh and the middle part of the archive on that goddamn floppy disk got corrupted…

  2. Alister

    For extra safety you can create a ‘Parchive’, or .PAR files from the split files (or an original, full-sized one). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive This allows damaged files to be repaired, without a huge overhead of storage.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!