How to split a zip file into chunks on Linux

Sometimes I need to upload log files to a vendor. For some reason large vendors like to add file size limits to their uploads. In a large environment this makes it hard to upload logs.

A way around this is to zip a folder and split it into smaller chunks of a pre defined size.

Lets say a vendor imposes a maximum file upload size of 85MB. we could use the zip command and tell it to create a new file every 85MB with the following:

zip -r -s 85m new-zip-name.zip /tmp/logfiles/*

new-zip-name.zip can be anything you want as long as it ends in .zip. The resulting files will have a number appended to them. 

/tmp/logfiles/* is the directory you want to zip up.

How to Tar and Gzip a directory

TAR is short for Tape Archive and is often refereed to as a tarball. Think of it as a Windows zip file without the compression.

GZIP is short for GNU Zip. It is used to compress a single file on the Linux platform.

Together, you can TAR a folder into a single file and then reduce the size of the file with Gzip. This makes it easy to transfer around a network or upload it somewhere else. 

1) Navigate to the folder which contains the directory.
2) Run the following command:

tar -zcvf new-archive-name.tar.gz directory_name

new-archive-name.tar.gz can be anything providing it ends in tar.gz

directory_name is the name of the directory you are trying to compress. If I wanted to TAR and Gzip the /tmp/ folder, I would run:

tar -zcvf TempFiles.tar.gz /tmp