Question

I have a rather large file (150 million lines of 10 chars). I need to split it in 150 files of 2 million lines, with each output line being alternatively the first 5 characters or the last 5 characters of the source line. I could do this in Perl rather quickly, but I was wondering if there was an easy solution using bash. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Homework? 🙂

I would think that a simple pipe with sed (to split each line into two) and split (to split things up into multiple files) would be enough.

The man command is your friend.

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Added after confirmation that it is not homework:

How about

sed 's/\(.....\)\(.....\)/\1\n\2/' input_file | split -l 2000000 - out-prefix- 

?