Compress
When/if you work with large files there are times you need to compress the file.
Let say you have a folder with your big file(s). You tar to compress it:
tar -cvzf MyFolderName.tar.gz MyFolderName
I used that recently to compress a virtual disk (.vmdx). It went down from 12.6GB to 5.3GB.
Split
So, that’s good. But the file is still kind of big to send or maybe upload somewhere. In Terminal:
split -b 200m MyFoldeName.tar.gz MyFoldeName.part-
That will create a number of 200MB files with the names:
MyFolderName.part-aa
MyFolderName.part-ab
MyFolderName.part-ac
MyFolderName.part-ad
...etc.
Now they’re more friendly sized to send or upload.
Merge
To put the big file back together again. In Terminal:
cat MyFolderName.part-* > MyFolderName.tar.gz