Create a test file
Sometimes we need to create files of certain sizes to test certain functionality like mail attachment sizes or something similiar. On Mac OS X and probably about any unix variant you can use the dd command to create a nice test file of garbage or in this case nulls.
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1048576 count=20 of=big_file
The input source is /dev/zero, the block size is 1048576 bytes (1MB in other words) and the count of the blocks to write is 20, and the output file is called big_file. This produces a file of exactly 20MB for use in testing.
$ ls -lh big_file -rw-r--r-- 1 username groupname 20M Sep 13 16:03 big_file
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