h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

yeah i got a huge file 48 mb and need to make it smaller sections of 10 mb or less.... anyone with a mac know if i have something on this OS X that will do it? i dont even know what to call the process so i cant look it up in my manuals

also.... any entries here in the guide that help with macs? if so what words do i plug into search to find them?

thanks

If all you need is a word to look up, then "chunk" is a possible one.

ok i looked for the word chunk in my finder window.. in my book manual... and in mac help on my computer. its not there. all i could find lol was chunky guitar in music.

I found this with Google:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=52335

ohhhh thank you! that is so informative! i faved it and will look into idisc etc as that may work best. also im a member of .mac but havent accessed it yet... guess i should huh thank you!!

I think 'stuffit' will break large files up into a number of smaller archives - and it should be available for Mac

split

It's built-in to OSX.

http://www.ss64.com/osx/split.html

Amazingly, that site does not explain how to use 'cat' to join the split bits together

Anyway, it would go somthing like this: First, you split 'em --

split -b 10m "file_to_split" segment

That should result in a number of sequential files, 'segmentaa, segmentab, segmentac, and so forth.

To join the bits, use the 'cat' command:

cat segmentaa segmentab segmentac >> joined_file

A bit of googling came up with some freeware 'gui' apps, or scripts to semi-automate this, but for occasional use why bother installing something?

If you'll be doing a lot of file splitting/joining, check out these links:
http://systemsboy.blogspot.com/2006/01/scripts-part-3-split-and-rejoin-large.html

http://www.xs4all.nl/~loekjehe/Split&Concat/

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/18628

taliesin i actually kinda understood that, what you said about putting the files back together! and i went to all those places and just loved it especially systemsboy site!

where im at now is i have stuffit and am reading the directions. i have a question tho... do the people i send my stufft files to have to have stuffit to open them?

also, i have tried to get on board with dotmac but there have been some major problems... i paid but i cant access my account so im waiting for them to cancel my account as per my request and then maaaaaaaaaybe next week i will reup with them. or maybe i will find another place that holds files. dotmac does 2 gb which is hardly huge.

so thanks for all your help and i will apprise you all of further developments

If you compress the file(s) using Stuffit, the recipient must have a program capable of uncompressing it(them)

If you are using Stuffit to split only, probably you can use the 'cat' command to re-assemble the bits, but in such a case there's no reason to use Stuffit rather than 'split'

btw, in this case, 'copy' is the functional MS-equivalent of 'cat'