How to repeat a dash (hyphen) in shell

Question

How can I repeat the character - n times in shell? I have read and tried this, but this does not work for -. It throws error invalid option

Answer 1

I would recommend using a traditional for loop, as there is no need to spawn sub-processes or expand 100 arguments:

N=100
for((i = 0; i < $N; ++i)); do
  printf -
done

It is curious that printf -%s triggers "invalid option" but printf - does not. To perhaps be extra safe, you could do printf %s -.