repeat character with printf

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

It's all in the subject. I try to figure out how to repeat a character a number of time with printf.

For example to draw a line in a script output.

Thks

2

I didn't know repeating characters was printf's speciality :slight_smile:

If you don't mind using perl, this should be ok:

$ perl -e 'print "-" x 25,"\n"'
-------------------------

HTH

3

Thanks. I was hoping to find some pure bash solution like padding with a custom character like in PHP

printf("%'#10s\n",  '');

Still looking.

4

ksh93/bash:

for i in {1..100};do printf "%s" "#";done;printf "\n"

zsh:

repeat 100 printf "#";print

or:

ksh93/zsh and bash:

ch="$(printf "%100s" "")"
printf "%s\n" "${ch// /#}"

bash3 :slight_smile:

printf -vch  "%100s" ""
printf "%s\n" "${ch// /#}"

and another one with zsh:

print "${$(printf "%100s" "")// /#}"
5

I like that one. The best I could come up with was this:

LINE="########################################################"
echo ${LINE,0,15}

Thank you.

6

Sorry,
in zsh it could be just like this :slight_smile:

print ${(l:100::#:)}
7

I have never found a real great ksh method that doesn't resort to the extentions of ksh93. But if I need this, I use a function...

$ function fill { typeset i=$1 c="$2" s="" ; while ((i)) ; do ((i=i-1)) ; s="$s$c" ; done ; echo  "$s" ; }
$ s=$(fill 15 \*)
$ echo "$s"
***************
$

In retrospect, "repeat" might have been a better name for the function than "fill". Maybe I'll change the name next time I use it.

8

here's the awk way- 65 '-':

nawk 'BEGIN{$65=OFS="-";print}'
9

ruby :slight_smile:

ruby -e 'puts"-"*65'
10

Some more from c.u.s.

one

two

11

That is tight.

12

That doesn't work in the ksh93 I have.

The function the OP referred to (from my book) concatenates 3 instances on each iteration.

That's a nice idea.

I used it (somewhat modified) in a couple of functions so that the character and number of repetitions can be easily specified:

The first function stores the result in a variable, by default $_REPEAT.

The second prints the result.

_repeat() ## USAGE: _repeat STRING NUM [VAR]
{
 eval "printf -v ${3:-_REPEAT} '$1%.0s' {1..$2}"
}

repeat() ## USAGE: repeat STRING NUM
{
 eval "printf '$1%.0s' {1..$2} "
 echo
}
13

An old thread I know but could be useful to some...

For ksh:

eval "$(resize)"
yes \- | head -${COLUMNS:-80} | paste -d \\0 -s -

Tim

14

printf "%080d"|tr "0" "-"