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For a while I've wanted to learn how to use csplit, so tonight I tried practicing. I created a file with some text, and where I wanted to split the text, I wrote two colons (::) surrounded by two newlines, so that they formed separate double-spaced paragraphs from the rest of the text. Then I invoked csplit thus:

$csplit filename /::/

I thought I had failed when I saw that the only thing printed to standard output was some numbers. But when I looked at the directory listing I realized I had partly succeeded. One bunch of text had been cut off from the rest, the top bit. I just needed csplit to notice the other places where I had put two colons. But I couldn't figure out how to do that. I thought it might be

$csplit filename /::/*/

but alas, that did not work.

Persuant to an answer below, I also tried

me@localhost:~/folder$ csplit story3.bkp /::/'{*}'

but I got

csplit: /::/{*}: integer expected after delimiter

so then i tried adding a space after /::/ -- which worked!

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up vote 5 down vote accepted

Are you looking for csplit file /::/ '{*}'?

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'fraid no cigar. amended question to reflect. –  ixtmixilix Oct 9 '11 at 16:31
nevermind. i just figured it out -- there's a space in between / and ', which the se markup doesn't show well in my browser. thanks... –  ixtmixilix Oct 9 '11 at 16:35
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