file.split {NCmisc}

Split a text file into multiple parts

Description

Wrapper for the bash command 'split' that can separate a text file into multiple roughly equal sized parts. This function removes the need to remember syntax and suffixes of the bash command

Usage

file.split(
  fn,
  size = 50000,
  same.dir = FALSE,
  verbose = TRUE,
  suf = "part",
  win = TRUE
)

Arguments

fn

character, file name of the text file to split, if the file is an imcompatible format the linux command should return an error message to the console

size

integer, the maximum number of lines for the split parts of the file produced

same.dir

logical, whether the resulting files should be moved to the same directory as the original file, or simply left in the working directory [getwd()]

verbose

logical, whether to report the resulting file names to the console

suf

character, suffix for the split files, default is 'part', the original file extension will be appended after this suffix

win

logical, set to FALSE if running a standard windows setup (cmd.ext), and the file split will run natively in R. Set to TRUE if you have a unix-alike command system, such as CygWin, sh.exe, csh.exe, tsh.exe, running, and this will then check to see whether the POSIX 'split' command is present (this provides a speed advantage). If in doubt, windows users can always set win=TRUE; the only case where this will cause an issue is if there is a different command installed with the same name (i.e, 'split').

Value

returns the list of file names produced (including path)

Author(s)

Nicholas Cooper

Examples

orig.dir <- getwd(); setwd(tempdir()); # move to temporary dir
file.name <- "myfile.txt"
writeLines(fakeLines(max.lines=1000),con=file.name)
new.files <- file.split(file.name,size=50)
unlink(new.files); unlink(file.name)
setwd(orig.dir) # reset working dir to original