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I have a gz file that is about 100 GB, I need to split it into many smaller files. Do I need to unzip it and then pipe it to split?
It makes no sense to split a gz file directly since the results can't be merged together again right?

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Which language are you using? –  p.campbell Nov 10 '11 at 19:25
linux shell script –  user881480 Nov 10 '11 at 20:03
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up vote 2 down vote accepted

What's your use case?

If you're trying to, for example, put the data on a set of DVDs and will never use one without all of them, and plan to reassemble them on the remote disk, split on the compressed data should be fine.

If you want to unpack one section independently of the others then, yes, you'll need to split the data before compressing.

The split files are just bytes, just like the original. You should be able to cat the parts together no problem.

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