How can I split a file into line ranges, e.g. lines 1-10, 11-20, 21-30?

Some Unix systems provide the split utility for this purpose:

    split --lines 10 --numeric-suffixes input.txt output-

For more flexibility you can use sed. The sed command can print e.g. the line number range 1-10:

    sed -n -e '1,10p' -e '10q'

This stops sed from printing each line (-n). Instead it only processes the lines in the range 1-10 ("1,10"), and prints them ("p"). The command will quit after reading line 10 ("10q").

We can now use this to print an arbitrary range of a file (specified by line number):

# POSIX shell
file=/etc/passwd
range=10
cur=1
last=$(wc -l < "$file") # count number of lines
chunk=1
while [ $cur -lt $last ]
do
    endofchunk=$(($cur + $range - 1))
    sed -n -e "$cur,${endofchunk}p" -e "${endofchunk}q" "$file" > chunk.$(printf %04d $chunk)
    chunk=$(($chunk + 1))
    cur=$(($cur + $range))
done

The previous example uses POSIX arithmetic, which older Bourne shells do not have. In that case the following example should be used instead:

# legacy Bourne shell; assume no printf either
file=/etc/passwd
range=10
cur=1
last=`wc -l < "$file"` # count number of lines
chunk=1
while test $cur -lt $last
do
    endofchunk=`expr $cur + $range - 1`
    sed -n -e "$cur,${endofchunk}p" -e "${endofchunk}q" "$file" > chunk.$chunk
    chunk=`expr $chunk + 1`
    cur=`expr $cur + $range`
done

Awk can also be used to produce a more or less equivalent result:

 awk -v range=10 '{print > FILENAME "." (int((NR -1)/ range)+1)}' file

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