How to Compress and Split Files in Ubuntu
In Ubuntu, the Archive Manager (or file-roller) has make it easy for anyone to compress and zip up a file or folder, but if you have a large file, say 20Gb, and you want to back it up to the CD/DVD, you will find that no amount of compression can you reduce the file size to fit into 1 CD/DVD. In such case, it is a better solution to compress and split the large file into several smaller files and store them separately. This also applies if you want to share a large file on a file-sharing site. Splitting the compressed file into several smaller files will make it easier for others to download.
Let’s say that the large file is a movie file found in /home/username/movie/large-file.avi and you want to compress, split and store the smaller files at the folder /home/username/movie/split-flies/, this is what you type in the terminal:
cd movie/split-files (change the filepath to where you want to keep the split files)
tar -cvj /home/username/movie/large-files.avi | split -b 650m -d - “large-files.tar.bz.”
You will now see several files appearing at the split-files folder, each with file size of 650MB and with filenames large-files.tar.bz.00, large-files.tar.bz.01, large-files.tar.bz.02, etc.
To recover and extract the split files, type
cat large-files.tar.bz.* > large-files.tar.bz
tar -xvj large-file.tar.bz
and you can get the original file back.
Do you know of any other ways to compress and split files in Ubuntu?
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5 Comments Received
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You wrote “tar -xvf large-file.tar.bz”
It should read “tar -xvjf large-file.tar.bz” because the tar file was compress with bzip2 and needs to be uncompressed with the same program.
Another more optimal way would be:
“cat large-file.tar.gz.* | tar -xvj”
@qiet72: Yes. You are correct. Thanks for spotting and pointing out the error.
[...] either backup to a CD/DVD or to an external hard disk. If the file is too big, you may want to compress and split it to several small files for easier [...]
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