home · notes

Unix Command - yes

The basic usage:

yes

This will flood your terminal with y, to stop it press Ctrl + C.

To customize the output, provide a string:

yes "Hello, world!"

This will continuously print "Hello, world!" on new lines.

Practical Uses of yes

Automatically Confirm Prompts

yes | sudo apt-get remove package-name

This will keep the CPU busy by continuously sending output to /dev/null.

Creating Large Files Quickly

Need a large file for testing? Use yes with head:

yes "data" | head -n 100000 > file.txt

This creates a file with a million lines of "data".