for loop in bash gives error

Question

One of my system have bash version 2.05.8, which is quite older. Now on this machine ii tried to use for loop in following format

 for i in {a..z}

But this gives , Please suggest the right statement

Answer 1

I'm not aware of a version of seq that works with letters. Do you have perl available? In that case:

for i in `perl -e "$,=' '; print a..z"`; do echo $i; done

I got the $,=' ' obscure part here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1445452/shell-script-for-loop-syntax

Of course I'm assuming you need to generate dynamic slices of the alphabet, otherwise this is probably not worth the effort and you should stick to:

for i in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z; do echo $i; done

Answer 2

Ranges only work for bash 3.0+

Your syntax is correct however:

#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..5}
do
    echo "$i) Bash version ${BASH_VERSION}"
done

Answer 3

Try this instead: for i in $(seq 1 5)