SDU File Split

Free utility for splitting CSV and other text files in Windows

Background

When doing some training, one of the students in the class asked what utility they should use on Windows for splitting a large file into sections. They wanted to split files for better bulk loading performance, to be able to use all available threads.

On Linux systems, the split command works fine but the best that most people came up with on Windows was to use Powershell. That's a fine answer for some people, but not for everyone.

Because the answers were limited, and people struggled to find a CSV splitter, we decided to fix that, and create a simple utility that's targeted as exactly this use case.

SDU_FileSplit is a brand new command line utility that you can use to split text files (including delimited files).

Usage

You can use it as follows:

SDU_FileSplit.exe []

The required parameters are positional and are as follows:

is the full path to the input file including file extension
is the maximum number of lines in the output file
is the number of header lines to repeat in each file (0 for none, 1 to 10 allowed)
is the output folder for the files (it needs to already exist)
is Y or N to indicate if existing output files should be overwritten

There is one additional optional parameter:

is the beginning of the output file name – default is the same as the input file name

Example Usage

Let's take a look at an example. I have a file called Cinemas.csv in the C:Temp folder. It contains some details of just over 2000 cinemas:

I'll then execute the following command:

This says to split the file Cinemas.csv that's currently in the current folder with a maximum of 200 rows per file.

As you can see in the previous image, the CSV has a single header row. I've chosen to copy that into each output file. That way, we're not just splitting the data rows, we can have a header in each output file.

We've then provided the output folder, and also said Y for overwriting the output files if they already exist.

And in the blink of an eye, we have the required output files, and as a bonus, they're all already UTF-8 encoded:

Downloading SDU_FileSplit

It's easy to get the tool and start using it. You can download a zip file containing it by clicking the image to the left.

Just download and unzip it. As long as you have .NET Framework 2.0 or later (that's pretty much every Windows system), you should have all the required prerequisites.

We hope you find it useful.

The Fine Print (Disclaimer and License):
We try our hardest to make all of our tools as useful and bug free as possible, but like any software, we can never guarantee that there won't be any issues. We hope you'll decide to use the tools but all liability for using them is with you, not us. They can be used privately or commercially. You may not re-purpose them, redistribute, or resell them.