Generate list of letters

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Heyas

I want to list passed arguments and make an incrementing 'marker'.
That 'marker' should be a letter between a-z, in proper order.

I'm not aware of a seq pendant, so i tried it with this:

		C=141
		list=""
		while [[ $C -lt 173 ]];do
			printf \\$C
			list+=" \\$C"
			C=$((C+1))
		done
		echo
		echo $list

But the output is quite confusing :frowning:

abcdefg
       8
9pqrstuvw89xyzmno
\141 \142 \143 \144 \145 \146 \147 \148 \149 \150 \151 \152 \153 \154 \155 \156 \157 \158 \159 \160 \161 \162 \163 \164 \165 \166 \167 \168 \169 \170 \171 \172

Any advices please?
Thank you in advance

2

\148 \149 \158 \159 etc. can't be interpreted as octal numbers, so the output (without further investigation) is a bit dubious.

---------- Post updated at 12:03 ---------- Previous update was at 11:59 ----------

BTW, in bash you have

echo {a..z}
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
1 Like
3

I guess it would be easier to make a simple hardcoded letter-list?

EDIT:
Thank you RudiC

---------- Post updated at 12:58 ---------- Previous update was at 12:05 ----------

So, having now a function to 'transform' a number into a letter.
Any performance suggestions?

	list=( $(echo {a..z} ))

	num2char() { # NUM
	# Returns a letter string: a-z
	# Or: aa-az ba-bz, etc
		num=$1
		out=""
		if [[ $num -lt ${#list[@]} ]]
		then	out="${list[$num]}"
		else	high=$[ $num / ${#list[@]} ]
			out="${list[$high-1]}${list[$num - ($high * ${#list[@]})]}"
		fi
		echo "$out"
	}

time ./tui-list -a {a..z} \
	{a..z} {a..z} {a..z} \
	{a..z} {a..z} {a..z} \
	{a..z} {a..z} {a..z} \
	{a..z} {a..z} {a..z} \
	{a..z} {a..z} {a..z}
..
...
# | ox) x                                                                                                          | #
# | oy) y                                                                                                          | #
# | oz) z                                                                                                          | #
DEBUG 416 lines shown

real	0m2.671s
user	0m0.788s
sys	0m0.609s

Have a good day

EDIT:
Ouch, without tui-echo, but just echo, its like more than 2 secs faster..
Guess it's all fine then :slight_smile:

...
oz) z
DEBUG 416 lines shown

real	0m0.218s
user	0m0.030s
sys	0m0.041s

Guess its the interface causing the slowness.

4

To get

    # Or: aa-az ba-bz, etc

: did you try

echo {a..b}{a..z}
aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah . . .  bw bx by bz
1 Like