Dear friends:

I have a datafile contains 1 to 40 lines or i can be varied between 1 to 40. I want to split the datafile into smaller files:

if the datafile has 40 lines or more,

file1 contains line 1 to 12
file2 contains line 13 to 25
file3 contains line 26 to 28
file4 contains line 29 to 40 (increment of 12)

and if the datafile has 12 lines or less
do nothing

Please advise

I got the idea of wc datafile

if datafile > 12 lines
save line1 to 12 > file1
save line13 to 25 > file ....
if datafile <= 12 lines
do nothing

I am lack of experience of unix syntax..

Many thanks!

You can use sed for this

if [ $(wc -l datafile|awk '{print $1}') -gt 12 ]
then
sed -n '1,12p' datafile >file1
else
echo less than 12 lines
fi

Thank you! I will try it ASAP

You can also try the 'split' command.

I tried SPLIT comand it worked great. I was able to choose lines number or number characters.

Thank you very much all the friends to take the time to helps!