How can I create 1000 files that I can use to test a script?

Question

I would like to create 1000+ text files with some text to test a script, how to create this much if text files at a go using shell script or Perl. Please could anyone help me.

Answer 1

Can you create one text file?

Can you devise a scheme to generate file names, eg. file0001, file002?

Can you write a for loop to do those two tasks.

At what point do you get stuck?

Answer 2

I don't know in shell or perl but in python would be:

#!/usr/bin/python

for i in xrange(1000):
    with open('file%0.3d' %i,'w') as fd:
        fd.write('some text')

I think is pretty straightforward what it does.

Answer 3

#!/bin/bash
seq 1 1000 | split -l 1 -a 3 -d - file

Above will create 1000 files with each file having a number from 1 to 1000. The files will be named file000 ... file999

Answer 4

for i in {0001..1000}
do
  echo "some text" > "file_${i}.txt"
done

or if you want to use Python <2.6

for x in range(1000):
    open("file%03d.txt" % x,"w").write("some text")

Answer 5

#!/bin/bash

for suf in $(seq -w 1000)
do
        cat << EOF > myfile.$suf
        this is my text file
        there are many like it
        but this one is mine.
EOF
done

Answer 6

You can use only Bash with no externals and still be able to pad the numbers so the filenames sort properly (if needed):

read -r -d '' text << 'EOF'
Some text for
my files
EOF

for i in {1..1000}
do
    printf -v filename "file%04d" "$i"
    echo "$text" > "$filename"
done

Bash 4 can do it like this:

for filename in file{0001..1000}; do echo $text > $filename; done

Both versions produce filenames like "file0001" and "file1000".

Answer 7

In Perl:

use strict;
use warnings;

for my $i (1..1000) {
   open(my $out,">",sprintf("file%04d",$i));
   print $out "some text\n";
   close $out;
}

Why the first 2 lines? Because they are good practice so I use them even in 1-shot programs like these.

Regards, Offer

Answer 8

For variety:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;
use File::Slurp;

write_file $_, "$_\n" for map sprintf('file%04d.txt', $_), 1 .. 1000;

Answer 9

Here is a short command-line Perl program.

perl -E'say $_ $_ for grep {open $_, ">f$_"} 1..1000'