Create a big file on Linux

Sometimes we need to have a random file of given size. We can name some common examples such as

• Test the file upload functionality
• Test if the application is able to handle a large set of data

On Linux we can create an empty file of particular size with the dd command. The following command creates sample.txt file of 1GB:

$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=sample.txt bs=1G count=1

The file size is the result of bs * count in bytes.

More

• Create a file of any size