How to use printf to print a character multiple times?

Question

Using printf, one can print a character multiple times:

$ printf "%0.s-" {1..5}
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In awk I know that I can do something like:

$ awk 'BEGIN {while (i++ < 5) printf "-"}'
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But I wonder if awk's printf allows this as well.

I went through the printf modifiers page but could not find how. All in all, what the printf from Bash does is to expand {1..5} and print a - for every parameter it gets, so it is equivalent to saying

$ printf "%0.s-" hello how are you 42
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However, I lack the knowledge on how to mimic this behaviour with awk's printf, if it is possible, because this fails:

$ awk 'BEGIN {printf "%0.s-", 1 2 3 4 5}'
-

Answer 1

I know this is old but the width modifier can be used e.g.

l = some_value

print gensub(/ /, "-", "g", sprintf("%*s", l, ""))

will print a variable number of - depending on the value of l

This was GNU Awk 3.1.8

Answer 2

If you can assume a (modest) upper bound on how long the result should be, how about something like this:

l = 5;
print substr("---------------------", 1, l);

Besides being dead simple, this has the benefit that it works in versions of AWK that lack the "gensub()" function.