#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $begin = time();
open (BIG, ">fiveHundredMB") or die "cannot open file for 500MB write";
my $c255 = '*'x255;
my $c256 = "$c255\n";
my $oneK = "$c256"x4;
my $oneMB = "$oneK"x1024;
print BIG $oneMB for (1..500);
close BIG;
my $end = time();
print "elasped time for 500MB file is: ", $end-$begin, " seconds\n";

__END__
elasped time for 500MB file is: 9 seconds
I opened this file in my text editor and there are
2,048,000 lines of 256 chars = 524,288,000 bytes.
Windows says: 526,336,000 bytes at command line.
This difference is a mystery to me at the moment.
But this is basically a ~500 MB file.