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From: miquels@maestro.htsa.aha.nl (Miquel van Smoorenburg)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: for loops
Keywords: sh: for i to $FILES
Message-ID: <2816@maestro.htsa.aha.nl>
Date: 4 Apr 91 13:34:15 GMT
References: <3693@ux.acs.umn.edu>
Sender: bin@htsa.htsa.aha.nl
Organization: AHA-TMF, Polytechnical Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Lines: 24

In article <3693@ux.acs.umn.edu> edh@ux.acs.umn.edu (Merlinus Ambrosius) writes:
>In sh, I'd like to do something like a BASIC for loop.  Say I have $FILES
>set to some number, and I'd like to go through a loop $FILES times.  Can
>this be done in sh?

POSIX states that sh(1) should be able to evaluate expressions, 
so you can do something like
while [ $FILES != 0 ]
do
	echo -n '* '
	FILES=$[$FILES - 1]
done

But I haven't seen a sh anywhere that is already capable of doing this
(not even the one I am writing myself for Minix... yet.).
Maybe somebody knows if a new ksh can do this?

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|                               |                                            |
| Miquel van Smoorenburg,       |  It's nice to be important,                |
| miquels@maestro.htsa.aha.nl   |  but it's more important to be nice.       |
|                               |                                            |
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