CDO

Hi,
I have several netcdf files that contain decades and I would like to split them by year and by month. I tried to chain the splitmon and splityear operator nut I get this error:

cdo splitmon -splityear pr_gswp3_1981-2010.nc pr_gswp3_

cdo splitmon: Started child process "splityear pr_gswp3_1981-2010.nc (pipe1.1)".
Error (pstreamOpenWrite) : (pipe1.1)1981.nc is not open!
Error (cdf_close) : NetCDF: HDF error

Finally I split those files using a bash script, but I would like to know if is possible to chain split operator for splitting multiple time steps of a dataset.

the output of cdo -V :

Climate Data Operators version 1.6.4 (http://code.zmaw.de/projects/cdo)
Compiled: by user on diogenis.hydromech.tuc.gr (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) Aug 2 2014 00:31:12
Compiler: gcc -std=gnu99 -fopenmp
version: gcc (GCC) 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-4)
Features: PTHREADS OpenMP NC4 OPeNDAP SZ Z JASPER UDUNITS2 PROJ.4 XML2 MAGICS
Libraries: proj/4.8 xml2/2.7.6
Filetypes: srv ext ieg grb grb2 nc nc2 nc4 nc4c
CDI library version : 1.6.4 of Aug 2 2014 00:31:05
CGRIBEX library version : 1.6.4 of Jun 27 2014 14:00:04
GRIB_API library version : 1.11.0
netCDF library version : 4.3.0 of Dec 2 2013 23:36:00 $
HDF5 library version : 1.8.12
SERVICE library version : 1.3.2 of Aug 2 2014 00:31:00
EXTRA library version : 1.3.2 of Aug 2 2014 00:30:58
IEG library version : 1.3.2 of Aug 2 2014 00:30:59
FILE library version : 1.8.2 of Aug 2 2014 00:30:58

Thank you in advance