The special option value - means standard input, and the output pieces will be named stdin-001, stdin-002, etc.
Splitting of large files is useful for electronic mail transmission (32KB is the recommended maximum size), and to facilitate FTP file transfers over connections that experience fatal timeouts for large files.
The split size is always forced internally to be a multiple of 512, which is the minimum block size on most current systems. By ensuring that the parts are multiples of file system blocksizes, corruption of the pieces through addition of padding garbage on some record-oriented file systems can be avoided.
For text files, where it is desirable to split at line boundaries, use split(1).
Nelson H. F. Beebe
Center for Scientific Computing
Department of Mathematics
220 South Physics Building
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT 84112
Tel: (801) 581-5254