> Eero Ahonen wrote:
>> Well ok, after that you wrote about chopping the file, which 
>> practically is what split does, but it should be able to work without 
>> creating millions of (temp)files in the middle of the process.
> 
> The problem is the size of the file. If I split it after the fact, I now 
> have *two* files, the original and the new one. So now instead of half 
> an hour of deleting directory entries, I have three hours of copying 
> data, followed by five minutes of deleting one directory entry.
> 
> Split doesn't split a file. It writes new files, each of which contain 
> pieces of the previous file.

With dd you could copy any section of the file into a new one.

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