Display characters of a variable

Answer 1

Here's a, hopefully quite close, translation.

var="Hello"
for (( i = 0; i < ${#var}; i++ ))
do
    echo ${var:i:1}
done

Illustrates a few bash concepts.

• ${#var} gives the number of characters in variable ${var}
• ${var:x:y} gives a substring of characters of ${var} starting at position x, length y

Answer 2

An alternate approach:

echo hello | sed 's/\(.\)/\1\n/g'