Oftentimes I find myself needing to work with large text files, and opening up huge files just chokes out even the best text editors. Most of the time, I only need a sampling of the file to get a picture of what is happening, and these are my go-to utilities.

I’m a big fan of Linux and GNU Utilities, but living practically, I use Windows as my primary workstation. One of my first installs on a new build is the GnuWin32 package available at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ The library is fairly small & lean, and doesn’t require complex environments.

Three useful utilities in the coreutils package – head, tail, and split.

Simply for head and tail:

head -n 50 input.txt

Optionally send the output to a new file:

head -n 50 input.txt > 50lines.txt

tail works the same way, and n specifies to grab the first or last n lines. The default value for n is 10.

split is a little more complicated, here’s the usage:

Usage: split [OPTION] [INPUT [PREFIX]]
Output fixed-size pieces of INPUT to PREFIXaa, PREFIXab, ...; default
PREFIX is 'x'.  With no INPUT, or when INPUT is -, read standard input.

  -b, --bytes=SIZE        put SIZE bytes per output file
  -C, --line-bytes=SIZE   put at most SIZE bytes of lines per output file
  -l, --lines=NUMBER      put NUMBER lines per output file
  -NUMBER                 same as -l NUMBER
      --verbose           print a diagnostic to standard error just
                            before each output file is opened
      --help              display this help and exit
      --version           output version information and exit

SIZE may have a multiplier suffix: b for 512, k for 1K, m for 1 Meg.

Report bugs to .

My task for split was to take a large file, and break it up into files no larger than 8MB each. The command used:

split -C8m input.txt split

That results in files no larger than 8MB, prefixed with split, and the best part is it keeps lines together.