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

This has been my goto for years... not AIX friendly though. Change the last character to change the repeating character which makes up the line

printf '%*s\n' "${COLUMNS:-$(tput cols)}" '' | tr ' ' _