Splitting, compressing and encrypting files before transfering to others ::: LINUX tricks :::

We all at some point have had to deal with transferring large files across computers. The obvious method is to compress it before sending. For extremely large files we can create a multi-part archive using the following commands.

• First of all, create a zip archive using

  $ zip -re <compressed_file_name.zip> <file1> <dir1>

  The -r switch allows you to add directories to the archive.
  The -e switch allows encryption, where the program asks you to enter a passphrase that needs to be entered by the recepient in order to extract the archive.
• Now split the archive into multiple parts with

  $ split --bytes=1K <compressed_file_name.zip> <PREFIX>

  Here, - -bytes=1K specifies that we want parts that are at most 1K bytes in size.
  PREFIX is any user string… For example, if the PREFIX is given as “split_”, then the files that are created will be named split_aa, split_ab, split_ac, etc.
• On the receiving side, you can extract the multipart zip archive with

  $ cat split_* > my_compressed_file.zip

  Where, “split_” was the PREFIX that the person who created the archive specified.
  Then, extract the whole zip file as follows.

  $ unzip my_compressed_file.zip