How to export a PostgreSQL table to multiple files

You can use the \COPY command in Postgres to export the result of a SELECT to a file (CSV, TSV, etc.). However, what if the table is huge? I faced this problem where the resulting CSV had more than 50 GB. Thankfully, the \COPY command also allows passing the result to a regular program, so we'll use the CLI program split and gzip to not only split the resulting file, but also compress it with GZIP.

\COPY (
  SELECT * FROM my_table
) TO PROGRAM 'split --lines 10000 --filter "gzip > /tmp/data_\$FILE.csv.gz"'
  WITH CSV

Note: The SQL was split in multiple lines for readability, but to run it needs to be in a single line.

This will generate the files data_xaa.csv.gz, data_xab.csv.gz, and so on, each with 10.000 lines, compressed using gzip.