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Scott Szretter
Asked: 2011-12-21 07:24:09 +0800 CST

how to split all the files in a directory in to 4gb files to a different directory?

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I have a directory containing several large files that are each greater than 4gb. I want to copy all of those files to a different directory (happens to be a fat32 usb drive mounted), but split the files down to 4gb (since the destination drive is limited to that size files).

I tried this:

split -b 4096G /var/lib/backuppc/images/* /usbdrive/

but I get a 

split: extra operand `/var/lib/backuppc/images/xxxxxxxxxmyfilesname.tib'

Am I doing something wrong? (also tried "4G" instead of 4096G, no difference)

files

2 Answers

  1. My suggestion would be to first create a tar file:

    tar -cf /tmp/bigfile.tar /var/lib/backuppc/images/*

    then split that:

    cd /usbdrive
split -b 4G /tmp/bigfile.tar

    If you want to avoid use of the temporary tar file you can pipe tar directly to split:

    tar -cf - /var/lib/backuppc/images/* | split -b 4G

    To reconstruct this when you get to the destination, recreate and unarchive the tar file:

    cat /usbdrive/x* >bigfile.tar
tar -xvf bigfile.tar

    Again, to do this without the temporary file:

    cat /usbdrive/x* | tar -xvf -
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  2. split can't take more than one input file as an argument.

    You can try using find for this

    cd /var/lib/backuppc/images && find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec split -b 4G '{}' "/usbdrive/images/{}" \;
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