Alain Kelder is a Giant Dork…

Calculate split percentage as part of the split command line

The split command is one gem of a Giant Dork tool, but it expects to be given the number of lines to split a file along. It’s easy enough to fire up a calculator to do this, but sometimes a programmatic method is desirable. Here’s a bashism that’ll do it:

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split -l $(echo $(( $(cat sourcefile | wc -l) / 3))) sourcefile sourcefile.

Assuming a file called sourcefile has 270 lines in it, the above will produce three smaller files of 90 lines each:

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ak@pork:~$ wc -l sourcefile.*
  90 sourcefile.aa
  90 sourcefile.ab
  90 sourcefile.ac
 270 total

If the number of lines doesn’t devide up neatly (let’s say sourcefile contains 271 lines), split will produce an extra file with the difference:

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ak@pork:~$ wc -l sourcefile.*
  90 sourcefile.aa
  90 sourcefile.ab
  90 sourcefile.ac
   1 sourcefile.ad
 271 total

I’m personally partial to numeric suffixes:

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ak@pork:~$ split -l $(echo $(( $(cat sourcefile | wc -l) / 3))) -da3 sourcefile sourcefile.
ak@pork:~$ ls -1
sourcefile
sourcefile.000
sourcefile.001
sourcefile.002
sourcefile.003