Chunking A Large File

Today I had the misfortune of having to transfer a file larger than 4 GiB using a FAT32-formatted USB drive.

Luckily there's the handy split command that splits a file into multiple chunks.

The following command splits the file into chunks that are each at most 4 GiB large:

split --bytes 4G large_file

The chunks are named xaa, xab, xac, …

On the other side one can use cat to reconstruct the file from its chunks:

cat x* > large_file