Split files using tar gz zip or bzip2

Question

I need to compress a large file of about 17-20 GB  I need to split it into several files of around 1GB per file   I searched for a solution via Google and found ways using split and cat commands  But they did not work for large files at all  Also  they won t work in Windows  I need to extract it on a Windows machine

User · Answer

use tar to split into multiple archives  there are plenty of programs that will work with tar files on windows  including cygwin

User · Answer

If you are splitting from Linux  you can still reassemble in Windows   copy  b file1   file2   file3   file4 filetogether

User · Answer

Tested code  initially creates a single archive file  then splits it    gzip -c file orig  gt  file gz  CHUNKSIZE 1073741824  PARTCNT     stat -c s file gz     CHUNKSIZE      the remainder is taken care of  for example for    1 GiB   1 bytes PARTCNT is 1 and seq 0  PARTCNT covers    all of file  for n in  seq 0  PARTCNT   do        dd if file gz of part  n bs  CHUNKSIZE skip  n count 1  done   This variant omits creating a single archive file and goes straight to creating parts   gzip -c file orig         CHUNKSIZE 1073741824          i 0          while true  do             i   i 1               head -c   CHUNKSIZE   gt   part  i                   CHUNKSIZE  -eq   stat -c s  part  i        break          done      In this variant  if the archive s file size is divisible by  CHUNKSIZE  then the last partial file will have file size 0 bytes

User · Answer

You can use the split command with the -b option   split -b 1024m file tar gz   It can be reassembled on a Windows machine using  Joshua s answer   copy  b file1   file2   file3   file4 filetogether     Edit  As  Charlie stated in the comment below  you might want to set a prefix explicitly because it will use x otherwise  which can be confusing   split -b 1024m  file tar gz   file tar gz part-      Creates files  file tar gz part-aa  file tar gz part-ab  file tar gz part-ac          Edit  Editing the post because question is closed and the most effective solution is very close to the content of this answer     create archives   tar cz my large file 1 my large file 2   split -b 1024MiB - myfiles split tgz    uncompress   cat myfiles split tgz     tar xz   This solution avoids the need to use an intermediate large file when  de compressing  Use the tar -C option to use a different directory for the resulting files  btw if the archive consists from only a single file  tar could be avoided and only gzip used     create archives   gzip -c my large file   split -b 1024MiB - myfile split gz    uncompress   cat myfile split gz     gunzip -c  gt  my large file   For windows you can download ported versions of the same commands or use cygwin

[linux] Split files using tar, gz, zip, or bzip2

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