Split the lines of a text file into separate files

Question

I have a text file that looks something like this:

foo
bar
zip
rar
tar

I need to use a bash script on OSX to make a new text file after every new line like this:

cat text1.txt
foo
cat text2.txt
bar
cat text3.txt
zip
cat text4.txt 
rar
cat text5.txt
tar

Answer 1

You can use csplit. It does the job well, except that it's somewhat inflexible regarding the output file names (you can only specify a prefix, not a suffix) and you need a first pass to calculate the number of pieces.

csplit -f text -- input.txt '//' "{$(wc -l input.txt)}"
for x in text[0-9]*; do mv -- "$x" "$x.txt"; done

The GNU version, but not the OSX version, has extensions that solve both issues.

csplit -b '%d.txt' -f text -- input.txt '//' '{*}'

Alternatively, if csplit is too inflexible, you can use awk.

awk '{filename = sprintf("text%d.txt", NR); print >filename; close(filename)}' input.txt

Answer 2

Version with pure bash...

unset i; while read -r l; do echo $l > "text$((++i)).txt";done < text_file.txt

Answer 3

Assuming the contents of the text file contains no spaces you could also use a for loop in Bash.

$ for x in $(<file.txt); do echo "$x" > text$((++i)).txt; done

Example

$ cat file.txt 
foo
bar
zip
rar
tar

Now with $i unset.

$ unset i
$ for x in $(<file.txt);do echo "$x" > text$((++i)).txt;done
$ ls -l text*
-rw-rw-r--. 1 slm slm 4 Oct 29 22:03 text1.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 slm slm 4 Oct 29 22:03 text2.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 slm slm 4 Oct 29 22:03 text3.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 slm slm 4 Oct 29 22:03 text4.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 slm slm 4 Oct 29 22:03 text5.txt

Confirming the results:

$ head text*
==> text1.txt <==
foo

==> text2.txt <==
bar

==> text3.txt <==
zip

==> text4.txt <==
rar

==> text5.txt <==
tar