This is a small post on how to crate multiple files/folders, sequence generation with flower brackets in-order to save valuable time.

Creating empty files can be done with touch command. We will see how to create multiple files using this command in one shot.

Example 1: Create a file with name abc.txt

touch abc.txt

Example2: Create multiple files abc, cde, efg, hij, klm

touch  abc cde efg hij klm

Example 3: How about creating 1 to 20 files, ie creating multiple files with one command. Its bit tedious job for an admin. Don’t worry Linux provide us with some useful option with “Flower braces” to do expansion. Instead of writing below command

touch 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

We can create 20 files using flower brace {} expansion as shown below..

touch {1..20}

Your shell tries to expand this brace and generate 1 to 20 numbers. The above command will create total 20 files in one shot.

Example 4: How about creating files as 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt up to 1000.txt. This can be achieved suffixing it after brackets as shown below.

touch {1..1000}.txt

Example 5: How about creating a1, a2, a3 so on up to a1000 files?

touch a{1..1000}

Example 6:How about generating numbers?. We can generate numbers using flower braces with echo command. The other way to generate numbers is seq command.

echo {1..10}

Example 7: Even we can do sequence for alphabets as shown below

touch {a..z}

Example 8: Generate files from A to Z

touch {A..Z}

Note: The above alphabets generation is done using asci values

Example 9: How about creating 1 to 1000000 files in one shot, by using multiplication/matrix of numbers?. We can achieve this one with multiplying two sequences.

touch {0..1000}{0..1000}

Example10: How about creating files as multiples of 2.

touch {1..100..2}

this will create files as 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 etc.

Note: This interval will work only BASH version 4.0 and above, make a note about this.

Example 11: How about creating files as multiples of 7?

touch {1..100..7}

Note: This interval option will work only bash version 4 and above.

Practical usage of this brackets

1) In bash for loop.

2) Generating sequence of numbers.

As mention in above examples we can create folders similarly in one shot. use -p option if you want to create folders in sub folders too.

Example 12: Create a folder structure as 2012, under this i want to create 12 folders for each month and under each month create 30 folders which corresponding to 30 days.

mkdir -p 2012/{1..12}/{1..30}

This will create folder 2012 under that 1 to 12 folders and under each of these folders 1 to 30 folders in one go.

Example 13: Usage in for loop.

for i in {1..10}
do
echo "Present number is $i"
done

Please feel free to comment your thoughts on this.

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Surendra Anne

Mr Surendra Anne is from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. He is a Linux/Open source supporter who believes in Hard work, A down to earth person, Likes to share knowledge with others, Loves dogs, Likes photography. He works as Devops Engineer with Taggle systems, an IOT automatic water metering company, Sydney . You can contact him at surendra (@) linuxnix dot com.