I have been trying to fit large compressed archives onto standard CD and DVD media. I have seen a few examples here on how to do this, so by goofing around, I found another method. I used split -b to chop up the files to the desired size, and then cat to put them together again.
First, take the files you want to split and gzip them (I won't explain that part, as it is so easy). Then with the resulting .gz file, do the following:
split -b 5m "YourGzippedFile.gz" SegmentFileName
The -b option will let you specify the size (use k for Kilobytes and m for Megabytes) and the SegmentFileName is the name of the splits that will be created, with aa, ab, ac, etc. appended after SegmentFileName until the file is completely split up. So say you split a file that was 20MB into four 5MB chunks (just an example). To reassemble them:
cat MySegmentab >> MySegmentaa
cat MySegmentac >> MySegmentaa
cat MySegmentad >> MySegmentaa
This will take each segment, starting with the second, and join it to the first (head) of the segment. Your file will be back together. Then just add .gz to its name and then gunzip it.
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http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060125023540821