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Transfer files bigger than 1.4MB on floppies using Linux/Unix

There are simpler ways to do this, but by far the most universal is this:
  • Create a single big file using tar and compress it using gzip
  • Split the file into smaller pieces using..you guessed it! ...split 
  •      split -b 1400k bigfile.tar.gz       (for Linux)
         
    or maybe: 
         split -10000 bigfile.tar.gz         (for Unix in general, or older split)
         
    With the second form (splitting based on occurence of newline character in a binary file), you may need to experiment a little with the parameter (-10000) in order to get decent sizes of the offspring-files. 
  • Put the resulting xaa, xab, xac, ... files each on a floppy and go to the other computer and copy all the pieces in a directory. 
  • If the destination computer is a Unix computer, then do this 
  •      cat xaa xab xac xad  > bigfile.tar.gz
         
    If you have lots of small pieces, you may consider using shell wildcards: 
         cat xa*  > bigfile.tar.gz
         
  • If the destination computer is a PC running Dos or Windows then, from a DOS-shell prompt do this: 
  •    copy /b xaa + xab + xac > bigfile.zip
       
If there were no errors when using either gzip -d, tar -x (destination Unix) or some kind of unzip (destination Windows) then you can be sure that the transfer procedure was ok.

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