I need to loop some values,
for i in $(seq $first $last)
do
does something here
done
For $first and $last, I need it to be of fixed length 5. So if the input is 1, I need to add zeros in front such that it becomes 00001. It loops till 99999 for example, but the length has to be 5.
E.g.: 00002, 00042, 00212, 12312 and so forth.
Any idea on how I can do that?
In your specific case though it's probably easiest to use the -f flag to seq to get it to format the numbers as it outputs the list. For example:
for i in $(seq -f "%05g" 10 15)
do
echo $i
done
will produce the following output:
00010
00011
00012
00013
00014
00015
More generally, bash has printf as a built-in so you can pad output with zeroes as follows:
$ i=99
$ printf "%05d\n" $i
00099
You can use the -v flag to store the output in another variable:
$ i=99
$ printf -v j "%05d" $i
$ echo $j
00099
Notice that printf supports a slightly different format to seq so you need to use %05d instead of %05g.