How can I split large files?

Question

I have a large CSV file (7.3GB; 16,300,000 lines), how can I split this file into two files?

Answer 1

Have you taken a look at the split command? See this man page for more information.

This page contains an example use of this command.

Aside:

the man -k command is rather useful for finding unix/linux commands if you aren't quite sure what the specific command is. Specify a keyword with the man -k command and the system will pull out related commands. E.g.,

% man -k split

will yield:

csplit (1)           - split a file into sections determined by context lines
dirsplit (1)         - splits directory into multiple with equal size
dpkg-split (1)       - Debian package archive split/join tool
gpgsplit (1)         - Split an OpenPGP message into packets
pnmsplit (1)         - split a multi-image portable anymap into multiple single-image files
ppmtoyuvsplit (1)    - convert a portable pixmap into 3 subsampled raw YUV files
split (1)            - split a file into pieces
splitdiff (1)        - separate out incremental patches
splitfont (1)        - extract characters from an ISO-type font.
URI::Split (3pm)     - Parse and compose URI strings
wcstok (3)           - split wide-character string into tokens
yuvsplittoppm (1)    - convert a Y- and a U- and a V-file into a portable pixmap
zipsplit (1)         - split a zipfile into smaller zipfiles

Answer 2

split -d -n l/N filename.csv tempfile.part.

splits the file into N files without splitting lines. As mentioned in the comments above, the header is not repeated in each file.