Comments on: Zero Padding in Bash

By: Thul Dai

Thul Dai — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:39:12 +0000

Thanks a lot, very useful.

What I often do as a workaround is add 100 (or 1000 as it were) so my ensemble runs (and respective folders, files, …) are numbered from 101 to 150 instead of 1 to 50. That works also easily in Fortran and other funky languages.

By: mardson

mardson — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:34:02 +0000

thank you all. much time saved, much work accomplished, minimal effort expended ;)

By: Binny V A

Binny V A — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:50:52 +0000

Thanks! I was going to write a script for this - you saved my time.

By: gxx

gxx — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:16:32 +0000

Thanks SirPavlova, that was exactly what I was looking for…

By: SirPavlova

SirPavlova — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:53:03 +0000

For anyone wanting to do this using jot, try “jot -w %03d 10 1″ for 001 to 010, etc. Hopefully this saves one or two people a trip to the man pages.

By: pedro

pedro — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:01:45 +0000

Great stuff, I used to program in C and C++ but never really realised how printf() could fit in shell commands/scripts.

Now I do! Good on ya, thanks

By: William Tracy

William Tracy — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 06:07:48 +0000

Thank-you.

Thank-you, thank-you.

By: snakehsu

snakehsu — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:29:06 +0000

Thanks for the tips. For your particular case you can use seq no problem. But sometimes you may need to use these numbers as array index, which is my case, in which I cannot use seq -w as Bash consider 01, 02 … as octet numbers so 08 and 09 would be “illegal” index. So I used seq without -w as index and used your printf method to generate zero paddings when I need them in the filename.

By: David

David — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:26:32 +0000

seq has an option to zero-pad (-w) so you can just do this:

seq -w 1 31

By: al

al — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:37:26 +0000

Starting to work on some BASH stuff the other day and this saved my sanity. Thanks!