how to CREATE a column with zero values in shell?

Question

How can I create a data file with one column in which there will be 1000 rows with zero values?

something like:

output:

0
0
0
0
0
.
.

.

Answer 1

You might use yes(1) for that (piped into head(1)...):

yes 0 | head -n 1000 > data_file_with_a_thousand_0s.txt

and if you need a million zeros, replace the 1000 with 1000000

^{PS. In the old days, head -1000 was enough since equivalent to head -n 1000 today.}

Answer 2

Simply,

printf '0\n%.0s' {1..1000}

or using for loop,

for i in {1..1000}; do echo "0"; done

using awk,

awk 'BEGIN{for(c=0;c<1000;c++) print "0"}'

---

As @StéphaneChazelas pointed out, Using {1..1000} requires zsh or recent versions of bash, yash or ksh93 and also means storing the whole range in memory (possibly several times). You'll find it becomes a lot slower (if it doesn't crash for OOM) than using awk or yes 0 | head ... for large ranges like {1..10000000}. Or in other words it doesn't scale well. Possible workaround would be to use

for ((i=0; i<=10000000;i++)); do echo 0; done 

(ksh93/zsh/bash) wouldn't have the memory issue but would still be orders of magnitude slower than a dedicated tool or real programming language approach.

Answer 3

perl -e 'print "0\n" x 1000' > file.txt

As @Stéphane Chazelas notes, this is fast for large numbers but can run into memory issues(use yes|head approach in that case)

performance comparison, selected best out of 3 continuous runs

$ time perl -e 'print "0\n" x 100000000' > /dev/null
real    0m0.117s

$ time python -c 'import sys; sys.stdout.write("0\n" * 100000000)' > /dev/null
real    0m0.184s

$ time yes 0 | head -n 100000000 > /dev/null
real    0m0.979s

$ time awk 'BEGIN{for(c=0;c<100000000;c++) print "0"}' > /dev/null
real    0m12.933s

$ time seq 0 0 0 | head -n 100000000 > /dev/null
real    0m19.040s

Answer 4

python2 -c 'print "0\n" * 1000' > file.txt

Answer 5

seq could be used:

seq 0 0 0 | head -1000