split was updated in coreutils release 8.8 (announced 22 Dec 2010) with the --number option to generate a specific number of files. The option --number=l/n generates n files without splitting lines.
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/split-invocation.html#split-invocation
http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=6662
