the version with RH6.2 says it has the -b option (I'm looking at the man page
right now)

> Uhh, what version of split are you using? Last I checked, all versions of split I had run into split files by linefeeds, and only some supported the -b option (mostly, the newer ones).
> 
> Are you positive about this? If so, is it a recent lobotomy, and is it common?
> 
> \_ How are you splitting your files, I am in need of away to take a large plain
> \_ text database report and break it up into small pieces.
> 
> In this case, split isn't your friend, since it doesn't care about
> line breaks, which, presumably your plain text database does.
> 
> Try successive runs of tail and head, or the following perl script