You can use brace expansion for generating a sequence of numbers and alphabets. printf helps you to display multiple arguments using the same format specifier. For example:

$ echo {1..3} 1 2 3 $ echo {1..2}{a..b} 1a 1b 2a 2b  $ printf '%s\n' apple banana cherry apple banana cherry

Combining the two, you can generate multiple lines of text. Here are some examples:

$ printf '%s\n' id_{3..1} id_3 id_2 id_1  $ printf '%s\n' item_{100..120..4} item_100 item_104 item_108 item_112 item_116 item_120

Here's a practical example:

# the string before %.s is repeated based on the number of arguments $ printf 'x %.s' a b c x x x  $ printf -- '- %.s' {1..5} - - - - -   # same as: seq 10 | paste -d, - - - - - $ seq 10 | paste -d, $(printf -- '- %.s' {1..5}) 1,2,3,4,5 6,7,8,9,10  $ n=5 $ seq 10 | paste -d, $(printf -- '- %.s' $(seq $n)) 1,2,3,4,5 6,7,8,9,10  $ n=2 $ seq 10 | paste -d, $(printf -- '- %.s' $(seq $n)) 1,2 3,4 5,6 7,8 9,10

info See this stackoverflow thread for other alternatives, avoiding printf for large numbers, etc.

Video demo:


info See also my Linux Command Line Computing ebook.