How do I iterate over a range of numbers defined by variables in Bash?

Question

How do I iterate over a range of numbers in Bash when the range is given by a variable?

I know I can do this (called \"sequence expression\" in the Bash documentatio

Answer 1

Here is why the original expression didn't work.

From man bash:

Brace expansion is performed before any other expansions, and any characters special to other expansions are preserved in the result. It is strictly textual. Bash does not apply any syntactic interpretation to the context of the expansion or the text between the braces.

So, brace expansion is something done early as a purely textual macro operation, before parameter expansion.

Shells are highly optimized hybrids between macro processors and more formal programming languages. In order to optimize the typical use cases, the language is made rather more complex and some limitations are accepted.

Recommendation

I would suggest sticking with Posix¹ features. This means using for i in ; do, if the list is already known, otherwise, use while or seq, as in:

#!/bin/sh

limit=4

i=1; while [ $i -le $limit ]; do
  echo $i
  i=$(($i + 1))
done
# Or -----------------------
for i in $(seq 1 $limit); do
  echo $i
done

---

^{1. Bash is a great shell and I use it interactively, but I don't put bash-isms into my scripts. Scripts might need a faster shell, a more secure one, a more embedded-style one. They might need to run on whatever is installed as /bin/sh, and then there are all the usual pro-standards arguments. Remember shellshock, aka bashdoor?}