How can I quickly make a large file?

The zero-fill method (here modified to avoid potential memory bottlenecks) took 17 seconds to create a 10 GB file on an SSD and caused Ubuntu's graphical interface to become unresponsive.

$ time sh -c 'dd if=/dev/zero iflag=count_bytes count=10G bs=1M of=large; sync'
10240+0 records in
10240+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB, 10 GiB) copied, 17.2003 s, 624 MB/s

real    0m17.642s
user    0m0.008s
sys     0m9.404s
$ du -B 1 --apparent-size large
10737418240     large
$ du -B 1 large
10737422336     large

fallocate creates large files instantly by directly manipulating the file's allocated disk space:

$ time sh -c 'fallocate -l 10G large; sync'

real    0m0.038s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.016s
$ du -B 1 --apparent-size large
10737418240     large
$ du -B 1 large
10737422336     large

truncate also works instantly, and creates sparse files which don't use up actual disk space until data is written later on:

$ time sh -c 'truncate -s 10G large; sync'

real    0m0.014s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.004s
$ du -B 1 --apparent-size large
10737418240     large
$ du -B 1 large
0       large

An easy way would be to use the dd command to write a file full of zeros.

dd if=/dev/zero of=outputFile bs=2G count=1

• if = input file
• of = output file
• bs = bytes

Use G in the size argument if you want computer (1024*1024*1024) gigabytes, or GB if you want human (1000*1000*1000) gigabytes.