Linux command to concatenate a file to itself n times

Question

I've taken a plain text file book from Project Gutenberg (around 0.5MB) which I want to concatenate to itself n times in order to generate a large text file that I can benchmark some algorithms on. Is there a linux command I can use to achieve this? cat sounds ideal, but doesn't seem to play too nice with concatenating a file onto itself, plus does not directly address the n times part of the question.

Answer 1

Two parts to this, to me - first - to use cat to output the text file to standard output, and use append to add it to another file - eg foo.txt>>bar.txt will append foo.txt to bar.txt

then run it n times with

for i in {1..n};do cat foo.txt >> bar.txt; done

replacing n in that command with your number

should work, where n is your number

If you use csh, there's the 'repeat' command.

repeat related parts of the answer are copied from here , and i tested it on an ubuntu 11.04 system on the default bash shell.