"touch" a new file of specified size

From: Douglas Mayne (doug_at_SLACKWARE-1.localnet)
Date: 07/31/05 

Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 11:19:23 -0600

I know I can quickly create a new file using touch, but is there a quick
way to create a new file of a specific size?

When I use dd as shown below, it takes a long time to create the file
because there is a write operation required for every byte in the file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=some_new_file bs=1024 count=8000000

Is there a way to allocate a file of the same size and not
performing any initialization? I know the resulting allocation might
contain random or junk data, but that's ok.

TIA...

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