The csplit command is a utility in Linux that is used to split a file into multiple smaller files based on specified criteria. It can split a file based on the occurrence of a particular string or pattern, or at fixed intervals of lines or bytes.
Here is an example of using the csplit command to split a file into multiple smaller files based on the occurrence of a particular string:
# csplit INPUT_FILE '/PATTERN/' '{*}'
This will split the INPUT_FILE into multiple smaller files, with each file containing all of the lines up to (but not including) the next occurrence of the PATTERN string. For example, if you have a file named “input.txt” that contains the following lines:
Line 1 Line 2 Line 3 Line 4 Line 5 Line 6 Line 7 Line 8 Line 9 Line 10
And you want to split the file into multiple smaller files based on the occurrence of the string “Line 5”, you can use the following command:
# csplit input.txt '/Line 5/' '{*}'
This will create two new files: “xx00” and “xx01”, with the following contents:
xx00:
Line 1 Line 2 Line 3 Line 4
xx01:
Line 6 Line 7 Line 8 Line 9 Line 10
csplit Command Examples
1. Split a file at lines 5 and 23:
# csplit file 5 23
2. Split a file every 5 lines (this will fail if the total number of lines is not divisible by 5):
# csplit file 5 {*}
3. Split a file every 5 lines, ignoring exact-division error:
# csplit -k file 5 {*}
4. Split a file at line 5 and use a custom prefix for the output files:
# csplit file 5 -f prefix
5. Split a file at a line matching a regular expression:
# csplit file /regular_expression/