In this paper, we construct four families of linear codes over finite fields from the complements of either the union of subfields or the union of cosets of a subfield, which can produce infinite families of optimal linear codes, including infinite families of (near) Griesmer codes. We also characterize the optimality of these four families of linear codes with an explicit computable criterion using the Griesmer bound and obtain many distance-optimal linear codes. In addition, we obtain several classes of distance-optimal linear codes with few weights and completely determine their weight distributions. It is shown that most of our linear codes are self-orthogonal or minimal which are useful in applications.
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