According to the scenario, John wants to break the my_backup.tgz file into two files in which the size of the first file named my_backup.tgz.aa should be 600MB and that of the second file named my_backup.tgz.ab should be 200MB. Hence, he will use the the split --verbose -b 600 my_backup.tgz my_backup.tgz. command, which will automatically break the first file into 600MB named my_backup.tgz.aa, and the rest of the data (200MB) will be assigned to the second file named my_backup.tgz.ab. The reason behind the names is that the split command provides suffixes as 'aa', 'ab', 'ac', ..., 'az', 'ba', 'bb', etc. in the broken file names by default. Hence, both conditions, the file names as well as the file sizes, match with this command. Note: If the size of the tar file my_backup.tgz is 1300MB, the command split --verbose -b 600 my_backup.tgz my_backup.tgz. breaks the my_backup.tgz file into three files, i.e., my_backup.tgz.aa of size 600MB, my_backup.tgz.ab of size 600MB, and my_backup.tgz.ac of size 100MB.