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Peter Urda edited this page Dec 23, 2015 · 7 revisions

Bash doesn't support variables in brace range expansions.

Problematic code:

for i in {1..$n}
do
  echo "$i"
done

Correct code:

for ((i=0; i<n; i++))
do
  echo "$i"
done

Rationale:

In Bash, brace expansion happens before variable expansion. This means that brace expansion will not account for variables.

For integers, use an arithmetic for loop instead. For zero-padded numbers or letters, use of eval may be warranted:

from="a" to="m" for c in $(eval "echo {$from..$to}"); do echo "$c"; done

or more carefully (if from/to could be user input, or if the brace expansion could have spaces):

from="a" to="m" while IFS= read -d '' -r c do echo "Read $c" done &lt; &lt;(eval "printf '%s\0' $(printf "{%q..%q}.jpg" "$from" "$to")")

Exceptions

None (if you're writing for e.g. zsh, make sure the shebang indicates this so shellcheck won't warn)

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