Generate File of a certain size?

Question

I'd like to generate a file with the name example.file. I could use

touch example.file

but I want the file to be exactly 24MB in size. I already checked the manpage of touch, but there is no parameter like this. Is there an easy way to generate files of a certain size?

Answer 1

You can use dd:

dd if=/dev/zero of=output.dat  bs=24M  count=1

or

dd if=/dev/zero of=output.dat  bs=1M  count=24

or, on Mac,

dd if=/dev/zero of=output.dat  bs=1m  count=24

Answer 2

Under non-embedded Linux or Cygwin (or any system with GNU coreutils) and FreeBSD:

truncate -s 24m example.file

This creates a file full of null bytes. If the file already exists and is smaller, it is extended to the requested size with null bytes. If the file already exists and is larger, is is truncated to the requested size.

The null bytes do not consume any disk space, the file is a sparse file.

On many systems, head -c 24m </dev/zero >example.file creates a non-sparse file full of null bytes. If head doesn't have a -c option on your system (it's common but not in POSIX), you can use dd bs=1024k count=24 </dev/zero >example.file instead (this is POSIX-compliant).

Answer 3

If you don't care about the content of the file, this is much faster than using dd:

fallocate -l 24M filename

Obviously, using dd for a 24MB file won't take any time on a modern system, but larger files can be noticeably slow.

Answer 4

You can use dd:

dd if=/dev/zero of=outputfile.out bs=1024k count=24

Or in case you happen to be using Solaris

mkfile 24m outputfile.out

Answer 5

refer other summary:

• truncate
  • truncate -s 24M example.file
• fallocate
  • fallocate -l $((24*1024*1024)) example.file
• head
  • random data
    • head -c 24MB /dev/urandom > example.file
  • zero data
    • head -c 24MB /dev/zero > example.file
• dd
  • dd if=/dev/urandom of=example.file bs=24MB count=1
    • dd if=/dev/urandom of=example.file bs=4MB count=6

Answer 6

FROM_NODE=N01;
echo; cd $MOUNT_PATH; pwd; ls -la; sleep 1; echo;
WHEN="$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S)";
fallocate -l 10M $MOUNT_PATH/"$FROM_NODE"_"$WHEN".dump
ls -lha; echo;