Today I was asked to reshare my notes from a class I took in the Fall as they noticed that they no longer have access to the files on Google Drive. Unfortunately for me, I had way too many files on Google Drive that I had to do a massive purge on my Google account which was not limited to only Drive itself but also most emails I had since 2011. Not wanting to overcrowd my Google cloud storage again, I decided to send them the notes either via email or Discord. However, the issue with that is:
- Both Gmail and Discord have a 25MB limit
- Sending via email takes my Google Storage
- Two of the three files are over 25MB
- Files were not highly compressible (little savings after trying both zip and xz compression)
In hindsight, I could have just split the pdf to have fewer pages but I did not think of that. So I guess the friend will be forced to boot up their Linux VM or hopefully had WSL2 on their Windows machine.
Splitting Files
split is a utility that is offered in most Linux Distributions and is a handy tool to split
files into many parts. The only issue is that it names files starting with the letter x and
each part is ordered from a to z so you get filenames like xa, xb, xc and etc.
While you can probably write a script to fix this, I’m lazy and I only needed to split two pdfs
into 20MB chunks so it wasn’t a pain to rename.
$ split --bytes=20M MATH3001-notes-1_231013_112237.pdf
$ ls -sh x*
20M xaa 16M xab
$ mv xaa math3001-notes1-1
$mv xab math3001-notes1-2
To combine them again, just cat the files:
cat math3001-notes1-1 math3001-notes1-2 > math3001-notes1.pdf
To verify the files were split and combined successfully, we can compare the md5sum (or just look at the pdf itself):
$ md5sum math3001-notes1.pdf
692e1b5fee087b0f6095cbacbeda3fa0 math3001-notes1.pdf
$ md5sum MATH3001-notes-1_231013_112237.pdf
692e1b5fee087b0f6095cbacbeda3fa0 MATH3001-notes-1_231013_112237.pdf
