Re: Additional feature for the seq command

[Paul Eggert]

Axel Liljencrantz <address@hidden> writes:

> I did this since the way I want to use this feature is for doing
> things with sets of data that is split in multiple files with names
> like sampa.asc, sampb.asc, sampc.asc, etc..

Aha!  That helps to explain things.

In that case, why not make this an alternative to --format?
For example, suppose I want to print a sequence of California
automobile license plate numbers, whose syntax is

  [1-9]?[A-Z][A-Z][A-Z][0-9][0-9][0-9]

Then I could do it with a command like this:

   seq --template='[1-9]?[A-Z][A-Z][A-Z][0-9][0-9][0-9]' 3ABC999 3 3ABD005

and the output would be:

   3ABC999
   3ABD002
   3ABD005

This is a nice generalization, both of your idea, and of the 'jot'
command's idea that James Youngman mentioned.

Perhaps it is _too_ general (:-), but something simpler would be OK
too.  But the point is that one should be able to easily generate
patterns like the one used by the output of "split".