I recently ran into an issue where I had about 7.5 GB of files split into 512M chunks downloaded from linux machine. The files had been generated using the split command:

split -b 512m files.tgz

This created the following files:

-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 20:44 xaa
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 20:46 xab
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 20:49 xac
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 20:51 xad
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 20:53 xae
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 20:55 xaf
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 20:57 xag
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 20:59 xah
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 21:01 xai
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 21:03 xaj
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 21:05 xak
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 21:07 xal
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 21:09 xam
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 536870912 Mar 9 21:12 xan
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 222082405 Mar 9 21:13 xao

I wanted to combine them in windows and looked around for a while until I realized you can use Microsoft’s copy utility in binary mode!

copy /b xa* files.tgz /b

Now I’m all done! Hurray for built-in utilities.

15 Responses to “Combine Split Files in Windows”

1. Fred says:

   3/12/2007 at 11:56 pm

   Why do you need the /b flag twice?

   Reply
2. Elliott Back says:

   3/13/2007 at 7:10 am

   Binary in, binary out.

   Reply
3. David says:

   3/13/2007 at 5:40 pm

   Great tip

   Reply
4. nod says:

   4/2/2008 at 8:23 pm

   Awesome tip!

   Reply
5. Michael says:

   12/13/2008 at 5:46 pm

   This is excellent. Thank you!

   Reply
6. Gary says:

   12/24/2008 at 6:43 pm

   Great! Exactly what i am looking for!

   Reply
7. AJay says:

   1/4/2009 at 2:56 am

   Thanks!
   it worked!

   Reply
8. Vinay V says:

   1/21/2009 at 6:34 am

   Great tip. You saved the day for me. Thanks.

   Reply
9. Eligio says:

   3/15/2009 at 11:02 pm

   I’m getting not enough space where the hd space has 209gb free space and the total files to be combined is only 10gb.

   Reply
10. lcabral says:

    3/19/2009 at 8:03 am

    Thanks! Much oblieged
    I was looking and only could find free/proprietary software to do something I was almost certain it could be done in the prompt command

    You saved my day !!!

    Reply
11. Vipin says:

    6/29/2009 at 5:48 am

    Good one. Thanks for the tip.

    Reply
12. taimoor says:

    7/27/2009 at 10:12 am

    Thanks! Absolutely awesome command, I’ve spent 2 hours messing around with duff alternatives and this worked instantly

    Reply
13. MagusVivendi says:

    10/6/2009 at 5:34 am

    Many thanks… Really a great tip.

    Reply
14. John Hendriks says:

    10/13/2009 at 6:23 am

    Thanx for the tip !
    Until now i used the CombineFiles-command of TotalCommander, which also works fine, but the “copy”-version is more elegant!

    Reply
15. David says:

    11/6/2009 at 6:26 pm

    it needs to be done on a NTFS file system

    FAT32 does not recognize files bigger than 4Gb

    Reply