Shell Programming and Scripting

I used the

Code:

fold -w 592 bigfile1  > bigfile2

given by itkamaraj up there and it works very well.

I just tried with the -c option and it seems it works as well

Be aware that the fold command will treat any tabs and backspace characters in your file specially. If those characters may occur in your data and you require splitting strictly after 592 bytes, you need to use the -b option.

If you are dealing with multibyte characters, want to specify width in characters instead of bytes, but want to avoid fold's special interpretation of tab/backspace, then you should use a different tool.

For more information on the special behavior, see the DESCRIPTION and RATIONALE sections @ fold

Perhaps none of this is of any relevance to your situation. I merely mention it in case it is.

Regards,
Alister

you can try this and check the result file "myfile.tgt"

Code:

i=1;>myfile.tgt;while [ $i -le $(sed -n '$=' myfile.src ) ]; do sed -ne ''$i' s/\(.\{592\}\)/\1\
> /gp' myfile.src>>myfile.tgt;((i++)); done

regards
ygemici

Thank you Alister for thoses precisions. I was not aware of those little important subtleties.
My file is hopefully a good old text file, with monobyte characters, no backspace, no tabulation, and no special character. There are only letters, figures and spaces here.
So i think "fold" will do the job.