Question

I wrote a script to fill a file for some Disk capacity testing. Could you please tell me why I have an error?

#!/bin/bash 
COUNTER=0;
FILE_SIZE_BITS=8589934592;
FILE_NAME="fill_me";
while [ $COUNTER -eq 0 ]; do
    echo "Dummy text to fill the file" >> "$FILE_NAME";
    SIZE='stat -c%s fill_me';
    if [[ $SIZE -gt $FILE_SIZE_BITS ]]; then
        let COUNTER=COUNTER+1;
    fi
done

the error is:

-bash: [[: stat -c%s fill_me: division by 0 (error token is "fill_me")

Thanks

Answer 1

The error is here:

SIZE='stat -c%s fill_me'

Do this instead:

SIZE=$(stat -c%s fill_me)

This sets SIZE to the output of the stat -c%s fill_me command. The $(...) syntax is the Command Substitution syntax:

Command substitution allows the output of a command to replace the command name.

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BTW you can do the same thing with dd^[manual]:

dd if=/dev/zero of=fill_me bs=1 count=8589934592