How to split one text file into multiple *.txt files?

Question

I got a text file file.txt(12 MBs) containing:

something1
something2
something3
something4
(...)

Is there any way to split

Answer 1

$ split -l 100 input_file output_file

where -l is the number of lines in each files. This will create:

• output_fileaa
• output_fileab
• output_fileac
• output_filead
• ....

Answer 2

On my Linux system (Red Hat Enterprise 6.9), the split command does not have the command-line options for either -n or --additional-suffix.

Instead, I've used this:

split -d -l NUM_LINES really_big_file.txt split_files.txt.

where -d is to add a numeric suffix to the end of the split_files.txt. and -l specifies the number of lines per file.

For example, suppose I have a really big file like this:

$ ls -laF
total 1391952
drwxr-xr-x 2 user.name group         40 Sep 14 15:43 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 user.name group       4096 Sep 14 15:39 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 user.name group 1425352817 Sep 14 14:01 really_big_file.txt

This file has 100,000 lines, and I want to split it into files with at most 30,000 lines. This command will run the split and append an integer at the end of the output file pattern split_files.txt..

$ split -d -l 30000 really_big_file.txt split_files.txt.

The resulting files are split correctly with at most 30,000 lines per file.

$ ls -laF
total 2783904
drwxr-xr-x 2 user.name group        156 Sep 14 15:43 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 user.name group       4096 Sep 14 15:39 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 user.name group 1425352817 Sep 14 14:01 really_big_file.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 user.name group  428604626 Sep 14 15:43 split_files.txt.00
-rw-r--r-- 1 user.name group  427152423 Sep 14 15:43 split_files.txt.01
-rw-r--r-- 1 user.name group  427141443 Sep 14 15:43 split_files.txt.02
-rw-r--r-- 1 user.name group  142454325 Sep 14 15:43 split_files.txt.03


$ wc -l *.txt*
    100000 really_big_file.txt
     30000 split_files.txt.00
     30000 split_files.txt.01
     30000 split_files.txt.02
     10000 split_files.txt.03
    200000 total

Answer 3

I agree with @CS Pei, however this didn't work for me:

split -b=1M -d file.txt file

...as the = after -b threw it off. Instead, I simply deleted it and left no space between it and the variable, and used lowercase "m":

split -b1m -d file.txt file

And to append ".txt", we use what @schoon said:

split -b=1m -d file.txt file --additional-suffix=.txt

I had a 188.5MB txt file and I used this command [but with -b5m for 5.2MB files], and it returned 35 split files all of which were txt files and 5.2MB except the last which was 5.0MB. Now, since I wanted my lines to stay whole, I wanted to split the main file every 1 million lines, but the split command didn't allow me to even do -100000 let alone "-1000000, so large numbers of lines to split will not work.