How can I quickly create a large file on a Linux (Red Hat Linux) system?
dd will do the job, but reading from /dev/zero and writing to the drive can take a long time when you need a file several hundreds of GBs in size for testing… If you need to do that repeatedly, the time really adds up.
I don’t care about the contents of the file, I just want it to be created quickly. How can this be done?
Using a sparse file won’t work for this. I need the file to be allocated disk space.