How can I split one text file into multiple *.txt files?

Question

I got a text file file.txt (12 MB) containing:

something1 something2 something3 something4 (...) 

Is there a way to split file.txt into 12 *.txt files, let’s say file2.txt, file3.txt, file4.txt, etc.?

Answer 1

You can use the Linux Bash core utility split:

split -b 1M -d  file.txt file 

Note that M or MB both are OK but size is different. MB is 1000 * 1000, M is 1024^2

If you want to separate by lines you can use -l parameter.

UPDATE

a=(`wc -l yourfile`) ; lines=`echo $(($a/12)) | bc -l` ; split -l $lines -d  file.txt file 

Another solution as suggested by Kirill, you can do something like the following

split -n l/12 file.txt 

Note that is l not one, split -n has a few options, like N, k/N, l/k/N, r/N, r/k/N.

Answer 2

$ split -l 100 input_file output_file 

where -l is the number of lines in each files. This will create:

• output_fileaa
• output_fileab
• output_fileac
• output_filead
• ....