UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi everyone,

I have some large text files that I need to split into a specific number of files of equal size. As far as I know (and I don't really know that much ) the split command only lets you specify the number of lines or bytes. The files are all of a different size, so the number of lines differ as well.
I use the following code to see how many lines each output file should be (1/50 of the original document):

y=`wc | awk '{ print $x/50}' | awk -F. '{if($2>=1){print $1+1}else{print $1}}'`
echo $y

The problem is that I can't use this variable $y as input for the split command like this:

split $x -d -l $y split/$x

It simply doesn't work. Does anyone know a way to pass the value of the $y variable into the split command? Or does anyone have a better way of solving the entire problem?

Thanks in advance!

It's not really clear why you can't use the variable. The way it is now, I don't think it contains a useful value (what does the echo print for you?) but fixing the scripts so it works sounds like the best plan unless you can explain why it "simply doesn't work".

Assuming $x is the name of the file you are about to split, try something like this instead.

Code:

y=`wc -l < $x | awk '{ print 1+int($1/50) }'`

I put in the addition of one on the theory that this should do something vaguely useful even with files which are too small, with a slight bias towards making the last file in the series smaller than the others. (Maybe divide by 49 instead to compensate?)

The echo gives me a number, which it's supposed to do.
The addition is used to round up the numbers: 231.2 becomes 232, but 231.0 stays 231.

I tried it again with the $x variable explicitly defined and then it worked. So the problem seems to be $x. (sorry, I didn't get much sleep last night ) This changes my question:
If I want to use my script with the original text file as input (like this: sh test.sh < file.txt), how do I call on the original file inside the script?
I obviously thought that the $x in 'split $x -d -l $y split/$x' would be replaced with 'file.txt', but it's not.

The positional parameters are in $1 $2 $3 etc but if you are invoking the script with redirection, there is no positional parameter, and no file name, just standard input.

Code:

vnix$ ./myscript file.txt oops   #  inside myscript, $1 is "file.txt" and $2 is "oops"
vnix$ ./myscript   # inside myscript, no file name is known; input is from standard input (terminal)
vnix$ ./myscript <file.txt   # again, inside myscript, no file name is known; input is redirected to come from file.txt

Thanks!!