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Master Shell Scripting – Zero to Interview Ready!🔥

Harshit Rawat on February 10, 2025

Introduction Hey Everyone, Good to see you back! For us programmers, diving into the world of Bash scripting is really important. It's a...

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Rajesh Royal • Feb 13

@harshit_rwt there is an error in the firstscript.sh file, It will not create 5 files (at least for me) instead it will create only 1 file with the name file_{1..5}.txt.

The below code works fine:

# Correct way to create the files:
for i in $(seq 1 5); do  # Use seq to generate the numbers
    file_name="$dir_name/file_$i.txt"
    touch "$file_name"
    if [ ! -f "$file_name" ]; then
        echo "Error: Failed to create file '$file_name'."
    fi
done

Nice article and good reading.

Harshit Rawat • Feb 13

Hi @rajeshroyal,
Thanks for your feedback! I appreciate the suggestion. The approach I used {1..5} does create five separate files in Bash, since it expands before execution, generating unique filenames (file_1.txt, file_2.txt, etc.).

I see why you might be getting file_{1..5}.txt , this can happen if the script is run in sh instead of bash, as sh doesn’t support {1..5} expansion. Your (seq 1 5) approach is a great alternative for broader shell compatibility, though {1..5} is slightly more efficient in pure Bash.

Really appreciate the discussion, always great to learn different approaches! 😊