Creating trash data?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

How could I go about creating some trash files to use for testing. All I need is for files to exist and the data in them really doesn't matter.

I need to do some work and testing with scripts and I don't want to mess with real data in my testing.

So I would like to generate say 10,000 files in a directory.

2

10,000 files containing what? nothing? garbage? random binary garbage? garbage text? You could tail 1000 lines from a system log and copy it. Or if empty will do, you can just do touch dir/to/file{0..9999}

3

Contents of the files do not matter, they can be empty. I just need a bunch of files.

4 
for N in {00..99}
do
        touch ${N}{00..99}
done

should generate empty files in the current directory from 0000 to 9999.

5

Only seems to create one file not 10000 files.

I'm using Bash with Free BSD.

6

Well, what file does it create? My crystal ball's still in for maintenance.

Here, in BASH, I can do:

$ for N in {1..5} ; do touch ${N}{1..5} ; done
$ ls
11  13  15  22  24  31  33  35  42  44  51  53  55
12  14  21  23  25  32  34  41  43  45  52  54
$

...which is just a reduced version of the script I gave you, creating 25 files of [1-5][1-5] instead of 0000-9999.

7

all I get is one file.

0B Nov 9 11:58 {1..5}{1..5}

Don't buy crystal balls from walmart those things are not reliable. You gotta get it from costco. :slight_smile:

---------- Post updated at 03:01 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:59 PM ----------

Think I got it to work using this.

for (( i=0 ; i < 1000 ; i++ )) ; do touch $i ; done
8

You've got a pretty bizzare configuration of BASH to not support the {1..5} syntax. Are you sure you're not using something else? Or maybe it's really, really old.

9

GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i386-unknown-freebsd5.3)
Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

10 
touch file{0..9}{0..9}{0..9}{0..9}

GNU bash, version 4.1.7(2)-release (i386-portbld-freebsd7.3)
Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
11

That's quite old. I think the syntax Corona mentioned was introduced with Version 3.