Joining and splitting files at arbitrary positions

Let's not be shy! Who has tried to open a large file by accident or even intentionally with an application and it didn't quite go as planned? I certainly have, and I have certainly seen the limitations such as the number of rows loaded in Excel, or OpenOffice calculator. In these cases, we use a handy tool that can split files at arbitrary points, such as the following:

• Before X number of lines
• Before Z number of bytes/chars

In this recipe, you will create a singe dual purpose script: a script that can use an input file and produce split or multiple files, and a second script to join files using a combining method. There are a few caveats when passing around string variables as they:

• Can sometimes lose special characters such as new lines
• (Binary) Should be handled by different tools than the usual commands on the command line

This file also reuses the getopts parameter parsing we saw earlier in Chapter 1, Crash Course in Bash, but it also introduces...