How to Create Large Files in Linux and macOS 1GB 10GB 100GB

For my work and personal projects, I sometimes need to create large files greater than 100MB, sometimes 500MB and often 1GB, 5GB, 10GB up to 100GB.

There are many ways to create large files with random content, but we will focus on the dd command in this blog post.

Create 1GB file with random content

This command will create a 1GB file 1gbfile.bin with random junk content.

dd if=/dev/zero of=1gbfile.bin bs=1G count=1

Output:

-rw-r--r--  1 asjohn  staff   1.0G Dec 16 23:15 1gbfile.bin

Create 2GB file

This command will create a 2GB file 2gbfile.bin with random junk content.

bs stands for block size. Note that when the file is greater than 2GB, we will use the seek option and set block size to 1.

dd if=/dev/zero of=2gbfile.bin bs=1 count=0 seek=2G

Output:

-rw-r--r--  1 arul  staff   2.0G Dec 16 23:14 2gbfile.bin

Create 5GB file

This command will create a 5GB file fivegbfile.bin with random junk content.

dd if=/dev/zero of=fivegbfile.bin bs=1 count=0 seek=5G

Output:

-rw-r--r--  1 arul  staff   5.0G Dec 16 23:16 fivegbfile.bin

Create 10GB file

This command will create a 10GB file tengbfile.bin with random junk content.

dd if=/dev/zero of=tengbfile.bin bs=1 count=0 seek=10G

Output:

-rw-r--r--  1 arul  staff    10G Dec 16 23:17 tengbfile.bin

Create 15GB file

This command will create a 15GB file 15gbfile.bin with random junk content.

dd if=/dev/zero of=15gbfile.bin bs=1 count=0 seek=15G

Output:

$ ls -lh *bin
-rw-r--r--  1 arul  staff    15G Dec 16 23:18 15gbfile.bin

Create 20GB file

This command will create a 20GB file 20gbfile.bin with random junk content.

dd if=/dev/zero of=20gbfile.bin bs=1 count=0 seek=20G

Output:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=20gbfile.bin bs=1 count=0 seek=20G
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 0.000019 secs (0 bytes/sec)

$ ls -lh *bin
-rw-r--r--  1 arul  staff    20G Dec 16 23:20 20gbfile.bin

Create 100GB file

This command will create a 100GB file 100gbfile.bin with random junk content. Just make sure you have enough available disk space before running this command.

dd if=/dev/zero of=100gbfile.bin bs=1 count=0 seek=100G

Conclusion

If you were able to create or not create a file with random junk content, let us know. Hope this blog post was useful. Thanks for reading.

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If you have any questions, please contact me at arulbOsutkNiqlzziyties@gNqmaizl.bkcom. You can also post questions in our Facebook group. Thank you.