How to copy a certain file several times with a regular ending?

I have a single file (a PDF) and I want to have lots of identical copies in the same folder (200 would be nice) named file-001, file-002 etc.

How do I do it?

You could do something like

< file tee file-{001..200}

however if the medium becomes unreadable it will not matter how many copies are on it - fundamentally backups require diversity.

Note that tee writes its standard input to standard output as well as to each of the given files - for large files, or for files containing binary data or other special characters that may interfere with your terminal settings, you will probably want to dump standard output to the bit bucket

< file > /dev/null tee file-{001..200}

This is the classic case where shell tricks help a lot.

for i in {000..199}; do cp file file-$i; done

And I know it's a joke, but if you want a random _ or - separating the number from the name you can use:

for i in {000..199}; do 
    cp file file$(cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc '_-' | fold -w 1 | head -n 1 )$i; 
done

(multiple line to help readability...)

:-P

To make a single duplicate of a file you probably know that you can use cp:

cp file file-001

Now, to make more duplicates to a file, you can combine cp with xargs. In your case:

echo file-{001..200} | xargs -n 1 cp file

will copy file to file-001, file-002,... ,file-200. See man xargs for more info.

As always, the python truck comes late, but:

make it executable, drag it over a terminal window, drag the file to copy over the terminal window and set the number of copies:

script file number_ofcopies

The number of leading zeros is set automatically, the files are named file_001.pdf, file_002.pdf, with the filenumbers placed before the extension.

The script:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import sys
import shutil

orig = sys.argv[1]; n = sys.argv[2]; size = len(str(n)); out = (orig[:orig.rfind(".")], orig[orig.rfind("."):])
for item in [out[0]+"_"+(size-len(str(item)))*"0"+str(item)+out[1] for item in range(1, int(n)+1)]:
    shutil.copyfile(orig, item)