How can I quickly make a large file?

Question

What is a quick and easy way to make a file that is, say, 2 GB in size?

Answer 1

The zero-fill method took 38 seconds on an SSD and caused Ubuntu's graphical interface to become unresponsive due to excessive iowait.

$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=large bs=2G count=1
0+1 records in
0+1 records out
2147479552 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 37.2512 s, 57.6 MB/s

real    0m38.059s
user    0m0.000s
sys 0m16.770s
$ du -B 1 --apparent-size large
2147479552  large
$ du -B 1 large
2147483648  large

fallocate creates large files instantly by directly manipulating the file's allocated disk space:

$ time fallocate -l 2G large

real    0m0.009s
user    0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
$ du -B 1 --apparent-size large
2147483648  large
$ du -B 1 large
2147487744  large

truncate also works instantly, and creates sparse files which don't use up actual disk space until data is written later on:

$ time truncate -s 2G large

real    0m0.003s
user    0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
$ du -B 1 --apparent-size large
2147483648  large
$ du -B 1 large
0   large

Answer 2

An easy way would be to use the dd command to write a file full of zeros.

dd if=/dev/zero of=outputFile bs=2G count=1

• if = input file
• of = output file
• bs = bytes

Use G in the size argument if you want computer (1024*1024*1024) gigabytes, or GB if you want human (1000*1000*1000) gigabytes.

Answer 3

ftp://ftp.fsf.hu/testfiles/maketestfiles.sh

or Seek is the size of the file you want in bytes - 1.

dd if=/dev/zero of=filename.big bs=1 count=1 seek=1048575 # 1 MByte

dd if=/dev/zero of=filename.big bs=1 count=1 seek=10485759 # 10 MByte

dd if=/dev/zero of=filename.big bs=1 count=1 seek=104857599 # 100 MByte

dd if=/dev/zero of=filename.big bs=1 count=1 seek=1073741823 # 1024 MByte

dd if=/dev/zero of=filename.big bs=1 count=1 seek=42949672959 # 40960 MByte