What are some quick ways of making N copies of a particular file?

Question

Say, if I wanted to make N copies of a.txt, and wanted them to be numbered a1.txt, a2.txt, a3.txt, etc...

How would I do such a thing succinctly?

Answer 1

cp itself can only make one copy (of a single file) at a time, but it's not too difficult with a quick loop:

for i in {1..10}; do cp a.txt a$i.txt; done

Answer 2

Assuming you have your N value in a bash variable:

for i in `seq 1 $N`; do cp a.txt a$i.txt; done

or

for ((i=1;i<=$N;i++)); do cp a.txt a$i.txt; done

or with the loop shown in Kevin's answer.

Answer 3

If you want something more funky, you can for example do: for t in $(seq --format="funky-%03.0f-numbered.txt" 25 3 40); do cp orig $t; done.