Sometimes it is useful to have something like Perl's 'x' operator, which repeats a string N times. This can be used to generate large strings for performance testing, for example, or just to create nice dotted lines when building a table of contents. {{{ awk function rep(str, num, remain, result) { if (num < 2) { remain = (num == 1) } else { remain = (num % 2 == 1) result = rep(str, (num - remain) / 2) } return result result (remain ? str :"") } }}} The function {{{rep}}} above is recursive, but performs very well under mawk, gawk and busybox awk. There are many other possible approaches (iterative, linear, very compacted, ones based on using {{{printf()}}} and {{{gsub()}}}), but tests showed them to be inferior in terms of performance, memory usage, code size, and sometimes all of the above.
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