Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I'm, new to shell scripting, I have a requirement where I have to split an incoming file into separate files each containing a maximum of 3 million rows.
For e.g: if my incoming file say In.txt has 8 mn rows then I need to create 3 files, in which two will 3 mn rows and one will contain 2 mn rows. The number of rows in In.txt will vary.

My Algorithm is as follows:
I would first do a wc -l on In.txt to get no: of rows
Divide the count/3mn to get no: of files to be created (8/3=2.66 ~3)
Then in a loop use head and tail commands to transfer rows into files into new file

The above algorithm will work, but I think using awk there may be something easier.

Please let me know if there is a faster and easier way of doing this

Regards
Wahi

I used the split command which reduced the code to one line

After getting number of rows in one file, you can use sed to split it

Code:

sed '$begin_from,$last_to w new_file1' original_file

as begin_from and last_to are your start and end lines, "w" means write these lines to the following file (which is new_file1 here)