fpart

sort file trees and pack them into bags

Fpart is a tool that helps you sort file trees and pack them into bags (called "partitions"). It is developed in C and available under the BSD license. It splits a list of directories and file trees into a certain number of partitions, trying to produce partitions with the same size and number of files. It can also produce partitions with a given number of files or a limited size. Once generated, partitions are either printed as file lists to stdout (default) or to files. Those lists can then be used by third party programs. Fpart also includes a live mode, which allows it to crawl very large filesystems and produce partitions in live. Hooks are available to act on those partitions (e.g. immediatly start a transfer using rsync(1)) without having to wait for the filesystem traversal job to be finished. Used this way, fpart can be seen as a powerful data migration tool.