# String multiplication in zsh


In Perl you have this:

    % perl -e 'print "a" x 5, "\n"'
    aaaaa

With that you can easily create a separator string
consisting out of 60 spaces.

I always missed this in my shell - until now.

In Zsh have the following expansion:

>    l:expr::string1::string2:
>
>     Pad the resulting words on the left. Each word will be truncated if
>     required and placed in a field expr characters wide. 

See [zsh.dotsrc.org](http://zsh.dotsrc.org/Doc/Release/Expansion.html).
There is also a `r:` variant which operates in the same way.

And lo and behold:

    % echo ${(r:40::-:)A}
    ----------------------------------------

No more:

    A="------------------------------------"