Need to prepend Zero's to a Count Variable

[harishraghunathan]

Hi Experts ,

We recently migrated from Unix to GNU Linux .

We were using the command typeset -Z3 for incrementing
counter values like ( 001,002,003....999 ) in Unix.

We are looking for an equivalent command that will perform this operation in Linux. We need the zero's prepended for the
variable and it cannot be avoided.

Any help is greatly appreciable. Thanks !!

Regards,
Harish

[Irithori]

This might help:

man printf

[Cabhan]

If you're simply trying to generate sequential numbers, you might try the seq command. In particular, the -w flag:

alex@niamh:~$ seq -w 1 10
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10

[drl]

Hi, harishraghunathan.

Welcome to the forum.

If you have lots of the typeset statements, and you want to change as little as possible, you could consider using shells that recognize the option "-Z3". However, the printf solution noted by Irithori could be made to work in many shells.

Here is a script that runs a fragment from a shell to demonstrate these ideas. The main script causes the three commonly-available shells bash, ksh, and zsh to execute the shell fragment commands. The versions of the shells are noted.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# @(#) s1	Demonstrate comparison of bash, ksh, zsh for "typeset".

# Utility functions: print-as-echo, print-line-with-visual-space, debug.
# export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"
pe() { for _i;do printf "%s" "$_i";done; printf "\n"; }
pl() { pe;pe "-----" ;pe "$*"; }
db() { ( printf " db, ";for _i;do printf "%s" "$_i";done;printf "\n" ) >&2 ; }
db() { : ; }
C=$HOME/bin/context && [ -f $C ] && $C ksh zsh

FILE=${1-shell-fragment}

pl " Input data file $FILE:"
cat -n $FILE

pl " Results, bash:"
bash $FILE

pl " Results, ksh:"
ksh $FILE

pl " Results, zsh:"
zsh $FILE

exit 0

producing:

% ./s1

Environment: LC_ALL = C, LANG = C
(Versions displayed with local utility "version")
OS, ker|rel, machine: Linux, 2.6.26-2-amd64, x86_64
Distribution        : Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.8 (lenny) 
GNU bash 3.2.39
ksh 93s+
zsh 4.3.6

-----
 Input data file shell-fragment:
     1	# Shell fragment to test availability of:
     2	#   typeset -Z3 v1
     3	# In various shells.
     4	
     5	typeset -Z3 v1=3 v2=22 v3=999
     6	echo " v1 is \"$v1\", v2 is \"$v2\", v3 is \"$v3\""
     7	
     8	v4=5
     9	printf " v4 from printf is \"%03d\"\n" $v4

-----
 Results, bash:
shell-fragment: line 5: typeset: -Z: invalid option
typeset: usage: typeset [-afFirtx] [-p] name[=value] ...
 v1 is "", v2 is "", v3 is ""
 v4 from printf is "005"

-----
 Results, ksh:
 v1 is "003", v2 is "022", v3 is "999"
 v4 from printf is "005"

-----
 Results, zsh:
 v1 is "003", v2 is "022", v3 is "999"
 v4 from printf is "005"

As you can see, bash (often the default shell in many GNU/Linux distributions) does not handle "-Z3", but the other two are fine. The printf solution works in all three shells. The printf command is usually a built-in, but there may also be a printf external command.

The man pages for shells are extremely long, but are your best source of accurate information. Those pages in combination with experimentation will be valuable guides to converting your shell scripts, as well in writing new scripts.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl