Splitting and Merging Files in Linux

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Sometimes you may need to backup a 1GB file and all you have are two 700MB CDs. This article will tell you how to split the file in parts and merge them back.

You can split a large file into smaller files using the following command:

split -b 700m <#file_to_split#> parts_

Where <#file_to_split#> is the file you want to split.

The above case file will be split into 700mb each. Assuming we have a 1 GB file two files will be created namely:

parts_1 i.e 700mb
parts_2 i.e 324mb

To merge the files back to original large file the command is:

cat parts_* > <#merge_file_name#>

Here is how one can upload to OneDrive:

1. Compress the files.
tar cvzf wmt.tar.gz wmt/
2. Split to blocks with acceptable sizes.  OneDrive max is 15GB, but maybe try split to 5GB files.
split -b 8192m wmt.tar.gz wmt_
3. drag and drop wmt_aa, wmt_ab, ... etc. to the OneDrive webpage.

Voila!

This way you reduce the upload size by about 2/3. It also bypass the nonsense MS file name requirements, e.g. not starting with dot, not dash, not empty …