commandliners

In Linux, the seq command is pretty useful in some scripts, because it prints a sequence of numbers:

$ seq 1 5
1
2
3
4
5

It is usually used in for loops:

for i in `seq 1 5`;
do
    ...
done

But this command is not included in BSD-like OSes. It is contained in the sh-utils, so one option is downloading and compiling it. But I prefer using the commands that come by default with the OS, for portability. In the BSD case, I found the jot command that prints sequential or random data. The following example shows the seq behaviour with jot.

$ jot 5
1
2
3
4
5

Other example where jot shows the integers between 13 and 17: the first argument (5) represents how many values will be shown. The second argument (13) is the number to start counting at:

$ jot 5 13
13
14
15
16
17