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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 1:55 pm and is tagged with rw 1, split files, hurray, user group, chunks, xa, gb, linux, microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

19 Responses to “Combine Split Files in Windows”

1. Robert says:

   9/27/2011 at 6:25 am

   Is there a way to split a file combined with Copy /b command right back to the original file components? That is, instead of:

   Copy /b file1+file2 file3

   I am looking for something doing just reverse like:

   Split /b file3 file1 file2

   Is there such a utility for Windows? I think Windows should provide such a tool since it has the combining tool (Copy /b).

   Thanks in advance!

   Reply
2. gilberto says:

   4/30/2011 at 10:10 pm

   Thanks, it is very helpful!; i think you can use the “type xa* > file.tgz” command in a simmilar manner

   Reply
3. Eric says:

   1/13/2011 at 10:35 pm

   Thanks batman! You saved my day!

   Reply
4. Leon Stafford says:

   1/4/2011 at 9:49 am

   Perfect, just what I was looking for. Am in China on an unstable network connection and can’t get upload huge file into S3. With this and then a Win2k8 instance I have running in EC2 can get the job done quicker, cheers!

   Reply
5. 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
6. 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
7. MagusVivendi says:

   10/6/2009 at 5:34 am

   Many thanks… Really a great tip.

   Reply
8. 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
9. Vipin says:

   6/29/2009 at 5:48 am

   Good one. Thanks for the tip.

   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. 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
12. Vinay V says:

    1/21/2009 at 6:34 am

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

    Reply
13. AJay says:

    1/4/2009 at 2:56 am

    Thanks!
    it worked!

    Reply
14. Gary says:

    12/24/2008 at 6:43 pm

    Great! Exactly what i am looking for!

    Reply
15. Michael says:

    12/13/2008 at 5:46 pm

    This is excellent. Thank you!

    Reply
16. nod says:

    4/2/2008 at 8:23 pm

    Awesome tip!

    Reply
17. David says:

    3/13/2007 at 5:40 pm

    Great tip

    Reply
18. Elliott Back says:

    3/13/2007 at 7:10 am

    Binary in, binary out.

    Reply
19. Fred says:

    3/12/2007 at 11:56 pm

    Why do you need the /b flag twice?

    Reply