How to create a file with a given size in Linux?

For small files:

dd if=/dev/zero of=upload_test bs=file_size count=1

Where file_size is the size of your test file in bytes.

For big files:

dd if=/dev/zero of=upload_test bs=1M count=size_in_megabytes

Just to follow up Tom's post, you can use dd to create sparse files as well:

dd if=/dev/zero of=the_file bs=1 count=0 seek=12345

This will create a file with a "hole" in it on most unixes - the data won't actually be written to disk, or take up any space until something other than zero is written into it.

Use this command:

dd if=$INPUT-FILE of=$OUTPUT-FILE bs=$BLOCK-SIZE count=$NUM-BLOCKS

To create a big (empty) file, set $INPUT-FILE=/dev/zero.
Total size of the file will be $BLOCK-SIZE * $NUM-BLOCKS.
New file created will be $OUTPUT-FILE.

You can do it programmatically:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main() {
    int fd = creat("/tmp/foo.txt", 0644);
    ftruncate(fd, SIZE_IN_BYTES);
    close(fd);
    return 0;
}

This approach is especially useful to subsequently mmap the file into memory.

use the following command to check that the file has the correct size:

# du -B1 --apparent-size /tmp/foo.txt

Be careful:

# du /tmp/foo.txt

will probably print 0 because it is allocated as Sparse file if supported by your filesystem.

see also: man 2 open and man 2 truncate

you could do:

[dsm@localhost:~]$ perl -e 'print "\0" x 100' > filename.ext

Where you replace 100 with the number of bytes you want written.

dd if=/dev/zero of=my_file.txt count=12345

Use fallocate if you don't want to wait for disk.

Example:

fallocate -l 100G BigFile

Usage:

Usage:
 fallocate [options] <filename>

Preallocate space to, or deallocate space from a file.

Options:
 -c, --collapse-range remove a range from the file
 -d, --dig-holes      detect zeroes and replace with holes
 -i, --insert-range   insert a hole at range, shifting existing data
 -l, --length <num>   length for range operations, in bytes
 -n, --keep-size      maintain the apparent size of the file
 -o, --offset <num>   offset for range operations, in bytes
 -p, --punch-hole     replace a range with a hole (implies -n)
 -z, --zero-range     zero and ensure allocation of a range
 -x, --posix          use posix_fallocate(3) instead of fallocate(2)
 -v, --verbose        verbose mode

 -h, --help           display this help
 -V, --version        display version