www.dantux.com/weblog

I have to write it down, because I always forget it. But it’s so easy though… just have to remember the “seq” command.

Example:

for i in $(seq 1 1000); do touch File_$i; done

or, for creating folders:

for i in $(seq 1 1000); do mkdir Directory_$i; done

Obviously you can specify whatever sequence of numbers you want.

“seq” command is not available on MAC’s bash. And I believe also on some version of *BSD. You can use instead the “jot” command. It acts a bit different, but you’ll get the hang of it. The first argument specifies how many numbers to count and the second argument sets the start number. So to generate a sequence from 1 to 1000 you’d type:

jot 1000 1

and in our example, would be:

for i in $(jot 1000 1); do mkdir Directory_$i; done

==========================================

Here’s an interesting script created to adjust “jot” to behave exactly like “seq” plus the wonderful benefit of padding the numbers:

http://fredrik-rodland.blogspot.com/2008/10/seq-on-mac-os-x.html

Thanks, fredrik!

P.S.: You gurus out there… please don’t smile. This is for newbies like myself…