This question is often asked in the various Unix and Linux forums. For example, suppose you want to create a string of 50 asterisks other than str=”***********************************” Here are some of the ways I have come across over the years. perl -e ‘print “*”x50’ ruby -e ‘puts “*”*50’ awk ‘BEGIN { while (a++<50) s=s “x”; print s }’ printf ‘%*s’ “50” ‘ ‘ | tr ‘ ‘ “*” echo “*****” | sed ‘s/.*/&&&&&&&&&&/’ The following works for gawk but not oawk. echo | awk NF=51 OFS=*
