repeat

Commandline program that repeats a string by a given amount. Supports a separator string, reversing the input string and can be used in pipes.

Background

In our Unix chat group the question "how can a string be printed repeatedly?" came up, and after some investigations on the internet we had to admit that there was no satisfying POSIX-like solution available as we know it from tools like cut, tr, grep, tac, wc, and so on. Here some possibilities ...

$ yes foo | head -n 3 | tr -d '\n'
foofoofoo

$ printf 'foo%.0s' {1..3}
foofoofoo

$ for i in `seq 3`; do echo -n 'foo'; done
foofoofoo

There is also a Rust implementation called rpt. Thank you alenpaul2001.

Building

make

Examples

$ repeat 3 foo
foofoofoo

$ echo 'foo' | repeat 3
foofoofoo

$ repeat -s ',' 3 foo
foo,foo,foo

$ repeat -- -2 foo
oofoof

$ repeat -e -s '\t' 3 foo
foo   foo   foo

Usage

repeat [-v] [-h] [-n] [-e] [-s <sep>] repetitions [string]

Options

-s <sep>  optional separator string
-n        do not output the trailing newline
-e        interpret some few escape sequences (\\,\t,\n)
-v        print version info
-h        print help text