mac create zip file command line of a folder

Name the file as appropriate, then pull down the “Size” sub menu and select a file size appropriate for your needs.Launch Disk Utility and choose “New Image”.Though most users looking to create large empty files are probably going to prefer the command line, you can also use Disk Utility. The latter multiplication method from CyberCit can be a bit easier if you’re not great at estimating large byte sizes. The dd command is a little less obvious to use than mkfile, but it’s stil fairly straight forward, you need to specify a file name, a block size, and a block count:ĭd if=/dev/zero of=FileName bs=1024 count=1000Īnother approach is to use the seek flag with some simple multiplication of a megabyte block size (1024), thus the following command would create a file that is 100MB in size (1024 x 100):ĭd if=/dev/zero of=LargeTestFile.img bs=1024 count=0 seek=$ The only downside to the mkfile command is that it appears limited to Mac OS X, thus if you’re looking for a cross-platform compatible solution that will work across other unix and linux variations you will want to use “dd” instead. You can confirm the generated file size with the finder Get Info command, or by using ls: Big files created from mkfile are full of zeroes. The file is created instantly and takes up the full size. Syntax for mkfile is as follows:įor example, to create a 1GB file called “LargeTestFile” on the desktop, the command would be: The simplest way to instantly generate a large empty file is to use the ‘mkfile’ command, which can immediately create a file of any size, whether fairly small in bytes or huge in gigabytes.

Create a Large File from the Command Line To follow along, open the Terminal app to get started. This is obviously aimed at a bit more advanced users with some fluency in the command line.

We’ll cover three ways to quickly generate files of virtually any size, two will use the command line one being operating system agnostic and the other MacOS and Mac OS X specific, and another more user friendly approach that utilizes the Disk Utility app native to Mac OS X.

Mac create zip file command line of a folder