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I have a 5 million plus line plain text file. Windows Notepad can't do anything and gets stuck when double clicking the file. Notepad++ is able to open the file though, even with 5M lines. I want to split the file into 10 single text files - i.e. the first 50K lines would be in an individual file, and so the next and next.

The problem is that when I Ctrl+G and go to the 50kth line, I have to hold shift, pressing the up arrow until the first 50k lines are selected. It takes several minutes. Is there any easier way to split up the files?

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This may be a task better handled by the command line. – iglvzx Nov 8 '11 at 1:31
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2 Answers

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Shift-control-home will highlight from the current position to the top of the file.

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wow this is indeed a shortcut for me,,even though it takes time,, i think it's much faster than just pressing shift+up and wait.. – robertshare Nov 9 '11 at 1:05
The "real" question should be "is there a utility that will split a text file into smaller files based on a number of lines". I think that would be a better solution to the underlying requirement. – Paul Nov 9 '11 at 1:59
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You might give SPLIT in GnuWin32 a try. Simply:

split --lines=50000 YourInputFile.dat OutputFile.

will generate:

OutputFile.aa
OutputFile.ab
OutputFile.ac
OutputFile.ad
 .
 .

each with 50,000 records. The final file will contain the remainder.

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thanks, i really want to try what you said, but i know so little about gnuwin32.. – robertshare Nov 9 '11 at 1:03
It can be a simple as downloading the core utilities (from gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm) and installing. Then, invoke split from wherever you've installed it. – BillP3rd Nov 11 '11 at 0:38
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