Creating string of repeated characters in shell script [duplicate]

Question

I need to generate a string of dots (.characters) as a variable.

I.e., in my Bash script, for input 15 I need to generate this string of length 15: ...............

I need to do so variably. I tried using this as a base (from Unix.com):

for i in {1..100};do printf "%s" "#";done;printf "\n" 

But how do I get the 100 to be a variable?

Answer 1

You can get as many NULL bytes as you want from /dev/zero. You can then turn these into other characters. The following prints 16 lowercase a's

head -c 16 < /dev/zero | tr '\0' '\141' 

Answer 2

len=100 ch='#' printf '%*s' "$len" | tr ' ' "$ch"