for loop range not working ksh

Question

I tried this,

#!/bin/ksh
for i in {1..10}
do
  echo "Welcome $i times"
done

in Ksh of an AIX box. I am getting the output as,

Welcome {1..10} times

What's wrong here? Isn't it supposed to print from 1 to 10?. Edit: According to perkolator's post, from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1591109/ksh-iterate-through-a-range

It works only on linux. Is there any other work around/replacements for unix box ksh?

for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

is ugly.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use this C-like for loop syntax instead:

for ((i=1; i<=10; i++))
do
    echo $i
done

Answer 2

The reason being that pre-93 ksh doesn't actually support range.

When you run it on Linux you'll tend to find that ksh is actually a link to bash or ksh93.

Try looping like :-

for ((i=0;i<10;i++))
do
 echo "Welcome $i time"
done

Answer 3

I think from memory that the standard ksh on AIX is an older variant. It may not support the ranged for loop. Try to run it with ksh93 instead of ksh. This should be in the same place as ksh, probably /usr/bin.

Otherwise, just use something old-school like:

i=1
while [[ $i -le 10 ]] ; do
    echo "Welcome $i times"
    i=$(expr $i + 1)
done

---

Actually, looking through publib seems to confirm this (the ksh93 snippet) so I'd try to go down that route.

Answer 4

It seems that the version of ksh you have does not have the range operator. I've seen this on several systems.

you can get around this with a while loop:

while [[ $i -lt 10 ]] ; do
    echo "Welcome $i times"
   (( i += 1 ))
done

On my systems i typically use perl so the script would look like

#!/usr/bin/perl
for $i (1 .. 10) {
    echo "Welcome $i times"
}