README

This little Perl script takes a delimited text file which has tabular data in it -- first row with columns followed by any number of rows -- and splits it to any number of file, each containing X number of rows, but always keeping the first row as the columns row.

The script can take one or two arguments: the first argument must be the filename of the source file. The second argument can be a the number of rows to put in each file. If the number of lines per file is not given 5000 is used as the default.

For example, if you have the following data file in the file "names_and_ages.txt":

Name	Age
Mary	20
Bob		30
Jake	12
Tod		45
Heidi	87
Tom		54


and you run the script:

./psplit.pl names_and_ages.txt 2

You'll get three files as an output:

names_and_ages1.txt:
Name	Age
Mary	20
Bob		30

names_and_ages2.txt:
Name	Age
Jake	12
Tod		45

names_and_ages3.txt:
Name	Age
Heidi	87
Tom		54



I wrote this to solve a specific problem I had, it's my first attempt at using Perl, so I'm sure there must be better ways to do this.