Is there a standard Linux command i can use to read a file chunk by chunk? For example, i have a file whose size is 6kB. I want to read/print the first 1kB, and then the 2nd 1kB ... Seems cat/head/tail wont work in this case.
Thanks very much.
Is there a standard Linux command i can use to read a file chunk by chunk? For example, i have a file whose size is 6kB. I want to read/print the first 1kB, and then the 2nd 1kB ... Seems cat/head/tail wont work in this case.
Thanks very much.
dd will do it
dd if=your_file of=output_tmp_file bs=1024 count=1 skip=0
And then skip=1 for the second chunk, and so on.
You then just need to read the output_tmp_file to get the chunk.
You could do this with read -n
in a loop:
while read -r -d '' -n 1024 BYTES; do
echo "$BYTES"
echo "---"
done < file.dat
split
can split a file into pieces by given byte count
Are you trying to actually read a text file? Like with your eyes? Try less
or more
you can use fmt
eg 10bytes
$ cat file
a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
good lord , oh my gosh
$ tr '\n' ' '<file | fmt -w10 file
a quick
brown fox
jumps
over
the lazy
dog good
lord , oh
my gosh
each line is 10 characters. If you want to read the 2nd chunk, pass it to tools like awk ..eg
$ tr '\n' ' '<file | fmt -w10 | awk 'NR==2' # print 2nd chunk
brown fox
To save each chunk to file, (or you can use split
with -b )
$ tr '\n' ' '<file | fmt -w10 | awk '{print $0 > "file_"NR}'