Unable to make a range of dummy files

Question

I need to make files called from File1, File2, ... to File99.

I tried the following unsuccessfully

cat test > {File1 .. File99}

The command without the word File did not work.

Answer 1

This will depend on the shell you are using. I assume you are using Bash.

According to http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Brace-Expansion, Bash will expand digits and single characters. So your brace expression should be:

File{1..99}

But I don't think the redirection operator ">" can output to multiple files. You might need to use a loop:

for output in File{1..99}
do
    cat test > $output
done

Or as a one-liner:

for output in File{1..99}; do cat test > $output; done

Answer 2

$ for i in {1..100}; do touch "File$i"; done

Answer 3

If you prefer a non looping version then you can use tee

cat test | tee File{1..99} > /dev/null

Answer 4

With zsh (with its *mult_ios*) you can :)

% zsh -c 'print test > file{1..3}' 
% head file*                      
==> file1 <==
test

==> file2 <==
test

==> file3 <==
test

Answer 5

Just one command:

touch File{1..99}

Answer 6

If you want the files to sort properly (file01, file02 ... file10, etc.), do this:

for i in {0..10}; do i="0"$i; touch file${i: -2}; done

Which is the same as:

for i in {0..10}
do
    i="0"$i
    touch file${i: -2} # or cat file > file${i: -2}
done

There must be be a space between the colon and the dash in the substring expansion clause. You can start the ranges above with 1 if you want to start with "file01".

Or, a much more succinct way to have leading zeros:

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

and to use phyrex1an's technique with this one:

cat test | tee File{0..9}{0..9} > /dev/null

This does make one extra file "file00". You can also do "{2..3}{0..9}" for "file20" through "file39", but changing the ones digit (the second range) would cause parts of the sequence to be skipped.