dd can write repeating \0 bytes to a file very fast, but it can't write repeating arbitrary strings.Is there a bash-shell method to write repeating arbitrary strings equally as fast as 'dd' (including \0)?All the suggestions I've encountered in 6 months of linux are things like printf %${1}s |sed -e s/ /${2}/g, but this is painfully slow compared to dd, as shown bel402653184ow.. and sed crashes after approx 384 MB (on my box) actually that's not bad for a single line-length :) but it did crash!I  suppose that wouldn't be an issue for sed, if the string contained a newline).   Speed comparison of dd vs. printf+sed:                            real        user        sys       WRITE 384 MB: 'dd'          0m03.833s   0m00.004s   0m00.548sWRITE 384 MB: 'printf+sed'  1m39.551s   1m34.754s   0m02.968s# the two commands used   dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=$((1024*384))printf %$((1024*1024*384))s |sed -e s/ /x/gI have an idea how to do this in a bash-shell script. but there's no point re-inventing the wheel. :)
How to write repeated free-form strings to a file, as fast as 'dd'?
bash;shell script;dd