How can I repeat a character in Bash?
Tip of the hat to @gniourf_gniourf for his input.
Note: This answer does not answer the original question, but complements the existing, helpful answers by comparing performance.
Solutions are compared in terms of execution speed only - memory requirements are not taken into account (they vary across solutions and may matter with large repeat counts).
Summary:
- If your repeat count is small, say up to around 100, it's worth going with the Bash-only solutions, as the startup cost of external utilities matters, especially Perl's.
- Pragmatically speaking, however, if you only need one instance of repeating characters, all existing solutions may be fine.
- With large repeat counts, use external utilities, as they'll be much faster.
- In particular, avoid Bash's global substring replacement with large strings
(e.g.,${var// /=}), as it is prohibitively slow.
- In particular, avoid Bash's global substring replacement with large strings
The following are timings taken on a late-2012 iMac with a 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU and a Fusion Drive, running OSX 10.10.4 and bash 3.2.57, and are the average of 1000 runs.
The entries are:
- listed in ascending order of execution duration (fastest first)
- prefixed with:
M... a potentially multi-character solutionS... a single-character-only solutionP... a POSIX-compliant solution
- followed by a brief description of the solution
- suffixed with the name of the author of the originating answer
- Small repeat count: 100
[M, P] printf %.s= [dogbane]: 0.0002
[M ] printf + bash global substr. replacement [Tim]: 0.0005
[M ] echo -n - brace expansion loop [eugene y]: 0.0007
[M ] echo -n - arithmetic loop [Eliah Kagan]: 0.0013
[M ] seq -f [Sam Salisbury]: 0.0016
[M ] jot -b [Stefan Ludwig]: 0.0016
[M ] awk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]: 0.0019
[M, P] awk - while loop [Steven Penny]: 0.0019
[S ] printf + tr [user332325]: 0.0021
[S ] head + tr [eugene y]: 0.0021
[S, P] dd + tr [mklement0]: 0.0021
[M ] printf + sed [user332325 (comment)]: 0.0021
[M ] mawk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]: 0.0025
[M, P] mawk - while loop [Steven Penny]: 0.0026
[M ] gawk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]: 0.0028
[M, P] gawk - while loop [Steven Penny]: 0.0028
[M ] yes + head + tr [Digital Trauma]: 0.0029
[M ] Perl [sid_com]: 0.0059
- The Bash-only solutions lead the pack - but only with a repeat count this small! (see below).
- Startup cost of external utilities does matter here, especially Perl's. If you must call this in a loop - with small repetition counts in each iteration - avoid the multi-utility,
awk, andperlsolutions.
- Large repeat count: 1000000 (1 million)
[M ] Perl [sid_com]: 0.0067
[M ] mawk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]: 0.0254
[M ] gawk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]: 0.0599
[S ] head + tr [eugene y]: 0.1143
[S, P] dd + tr [mklement0]: 0.1144
[S ] printf + tr [user332325]: 0.1164
[M, P] mawk - while loop [Steven Penny]: 0.1434
[M ] seq -f [Sam Salisbury]: 0.1452
[M ] jot -b [Stefan Ludwig]: 0.1690
[M ] printf + sed [user332325 (comment)]: 0.1735
[M ] yes + head + tr [Digital Trauma]: 0.1883
[M, P] gawk - while loop [Steven Penny]: 0.2493
[M ] awk - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]: 0.2614
[M, P] awk - while loop [Steven Penny]: 0.3211
[M, P] printf %.s= [dogbane]: 2.4565
[M ] echo -n - brace expansion loop [eugene y]: 7.5877
[M ] echo -n - arithmetic loop [Eliah Kagan]: 13.5426
[M ] printf + bash global substr. replacement [Tim]: n/a
- The Perl solution from the question is by far the fastest.
- Bash's global string-replacement (
${foo// /=}) is inexplicably excruciatingly slow with large strings, and has been taken out of the running (took around 50 minutes(!) in Bash 4.3.30, and even longer in Bash 3.2.57 - I never waited for it to finish). - Bash loops are slow, and arithmetic loops (
(( i= 0; ... ))) are slower than brace-expanded ones ({1..n}) - though arithmetic loops are more memory-efficient. awkrefers to BSDawk(as also found on OSX) - it's noticeably slower thangawk(GNU Awk) and especiallymawk.- Note that with large counts and multi-char. strings, memory consumption can become a consideration - the approaches differ in that respect.
Here's the Bash script (testrepeat) that produced the above.
It takes 2 arguments:
- the character repeat count
- optionally, the number of test runs to perform and to calculate the average timing from
In other words: the timings above were obtained with testrepeat 100 1000 and testrepeat 1000000 1000
#!/usr/bin/env bash
title() { printf '%s:\t' "$1"; }
TIMEFORMAT=$'%6Rs'
# The number of repetitions of the input chars. to produce
COUNT_REPETITIONS=${1?Arguments: <charRepeatCount> [<testRunCount>]}
# The number of test runs to perform to derive the average timing from.
COUNT_RUNS=${2:-1}
# Discard the (stdout) output generated by default.
# If you want to check the results, replace '/dev/null' on the following
# line with a prefix path to which a running index starting with 1 will
# be appended for each test run; e.g., outFilePrefix='outfile', which
# will produce outfile1, outfile2, ...
outFilePrefix=/dev/null
{
outFile=$outFilePrefix
ndx=0
title '[M, P] printf %.s= [dogbane]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
# !! In order to use brace expansion with a variable, we must use `eval`.
eval "
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
printf '%.s=' {1..$COUNT_REPETITIONS} >"$outFile"
done"
title '[M ] echo -n - arithmetic loop [Eliah Kagan]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
for ((i=0; i<COUNT_REPETITIONS; ++i)); do echo -n =; done >"$outFile"
done
title '[M ] echo -n - brace expansion loop [eugene y]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
# !! In order to use brace expansion with a variable, we must use `eval`.
eval "
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
for i in {1..$COUNT_REPETITIONS}; do echo -n =; done >"$outFile"
done
"
title '[M ] printf + sed [user332325 (comment)]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
printf "%${COUNT_REPETITIONS}s" | sed 's/ /=/g' >"$outFile"
done
title '[S ] printf + tr [user332325]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
printf "%${COUNT_REPETITIONS}s" | tr ' ' '=' >"$outFile"
done
title '[S ] head + tr [eugene y]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
head -c $COUNT_REPETITIONS < /dev/zero | tr '\0' '=' >"$outFile"
done
title '[M ] seq -f [Sam Salisbury]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
seq -f '=' -s '' $COUNT_REPETITIONS >"$outFile"
done
title '[M ] jot -b [Stefan Ludwig]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
jot -s '' -b '=' $COUNT_REPETITIONS >"$outFile"
done
title '[M ] yes + head + tr [Digital Trauma]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
yes = | head -$COUNT_REPETITIONS | tr -d '\n' >"$outFile"
done
title '[M ] Perl [sid_com]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
perl -e "print \"=\" x $COUNT_REPETITIONS" >"$outFile"
done
title '[S, P] dd + tr [mklement0]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
dd if=/dev/zero bs=$COUNT_REPETITIONS count=1 2>/dev/null | tr '\0' "=" >"$outFile"
done
# !! On OSX, awk is BSD awk, and mawk and gawk were installed later.
# !! On Linux systems, awk may refer to either mawk or gawk.
for awkBin in awk mawk gawk; do
if [[ -x $(command -v $awkBin) ]]; then
title "[M ] $awkBin"' - $(count+1)="=" [Steven Penny (variant)]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
$awkBin -v count=$COUNT_REPETITIONS 'BEGIN { OFS="="; $(count+1)=""; print }' >"$outFile"
done
title "[M, P] $awkBin"' - while loop [Steven Penny]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
$awkBin -v count=$COUNT_REPETITIONS 'BEGIN { while (i++ < count) printf "=" }' >"$outFile"
done
fi
done
title '[M ] printf + bash global substr. replacement [Tim]'
[[ $outFile != '/dev/null' ]] && outFile="$outFilePrefix$((++ndx))"
# !! In Bash 4.3.30 a single run with repeat count of 1 million took almost
# !! 50 *minutes*(!) to complete; n Bash 3.2.57 it's seemingly even slower -
# !! didn't wait for it to finish.
# !! Thus, this test is skipped for counts that are likely to be much slower
# !! than the other tests.
skip=0
[[ $BASH_VERSINFO -le 3 && COUNT_REPETITIONS -gt 1000 ]] && skip=1
[[ $BASH_VERSINFO -eq 4 && COUNT_REPETITIONS -gt 10000 ]] && skip=1
if (( skip )); then
echo 'n/a' >&2
else
time for (( n = 0; n < COUNT_RUNS; n++ )); do
{ printf -v t "%${COUNT_REPETITIONS}s" '='; printf %s "${t// /=}"; } >"$outFile"
done
fi
} 2>&1 |
sort -t$'\t' -k2,2n |
awk -F $'\t' -v count=$COUNT_RUNS '{
printf "%s\t", $1;
if ($2 ~ "^n/a") { print $2 } else { printf "%.4f\n", $2 / count }}' |
column -s$'\t' -t
No easy way. But for example:
seq -s= 100|tr -d '[:digit:]'
# Editor's note: This requires BSD seq, and breaks with GNU seq (see comments)
Or maybe a standard-conforming way:
printf %100s |tr " " "="
There's also a tput rep, but as for my terminals at hand (xterm and linux) they don't seem to support it:)
You can use:
printf '=%.0s' {1..100}
How this works:
Bash expands {1..100} so the command becomes:
printf '=%.0s' 1 2 3 4 ... 100
I've set printf's format to =%.0s which means that it will always print a single = no matter what argument it is given. Therefore it prints 100 =s.