Generate large files in Unix ad hoc

A neat trick to generate large files ad hoc is to run one of the simplest Unix commands ever: yes.

When executed, it regurgitates an infinite stream of ys (suffixed with newlines):

$ yes
y
y
y
y
...

Piping its output into a file for approximately 10 seconds on a Mac Mini (M1, 2020) yields an 18-GB file containing 9.6 billion lines!

$ yes >> yes.log
^C
$ ls -lh
total 37664520
-rw-r--r--  1 abdelrahman  staff    18G Dec 28 17:16 yes.log
$ wc -l yes.log
 9637725825 yes.log