It's still there, probably for compatibility with old shells and scripts that explicitly use /bin/[ for some reason. But years ago [ got built in to the shell for speed reasons. It's the same as test, which it is typically a symlink to, except if you call it as [ you need to pass a final syntactic-sugar ] argument too. Wacky.

Old-timer shell programmers grew up being taught to use case where possible because it was built into the shell and didn’t need an extra process to be forked.

It's still there, probably for compatibility with old shells and scripts that explicitly use /bin/[ for some reason. But years ago [ got built in to the shell for speed reasons. It's the same as test, which it is typically a symlink to, except if you call it as [ you need to pass a final syntactic-sugar ] argument too. Wacky.

Old-timer shell programmers grew up being taught to use case where possible because it was built into the shell and didn’t need an extra process to be forked.

At least in example code I tend to avoid special things like seq (and there used to be another useful tool like seq called jot). There’s also arithmetic built into some shells, so in bash I could have used

for ((i = 5000; i < 200000; i += 5000))

or

while [ $((i++) -lt 200000 ]

Anyway, thanks. I did in fact use expr. I always meant to make myself use arithmetic in bash, given that bash is pretty much ubiquitous now.

BTW, I still sometimes use expr for regexp matching. That's even more ugly and prehistoric :-)

At least in example code I tend to avoid special things like seq (and there used to be another useful tool like seq called jot). There’s also arithmetic built into some shells, so in bash I could have used

for ((i = 5000; i < 200000; i += 5000))

or

while [ $((i++) -lt 200000 ]

Anyway, thanks. I did in fact use expr. I always meant to make myself use arithmetic in bash, given that bash is pretty much ubiquitous now.

BTW, I still sometimes use expr for regexp matching. That’s even more ugly and prehistoric :-)

while [ $i -lt 200000 ]
do
wget –http-user terrycojones –http-passwd xxx \
http://www.twitter.com/statuses/show/$i.xml
i=`expr $i + 5000`
sleep 1
done

spawning a process inside a loop for just incrementing a variable is a big NO :-) It’s better to do something like this if “seq” is available on your machine:

for i in `seq 5000 200000`
do
wget –http-user terrycojones –http-passwd xxx \
http://www.twitter.com/statuses/show/$i.xml
sleep 1
done

while [ $i -lt 200000 ]
do
wget –http-user terrycojones –http-passwd xxx
http://www.twitter.com/statuses/show/$i.xml
i=`expr $i + 5000`
sleep 1
done

spawning a process inside a loop for just incrementing a variable is a big NO :-) It’s better to do something like this if “seq” is available on your machine:

for i in `seq 5000 200000`
do
wget –http-user terrycojones –http-passwd xxx
http://www.twitter.com/statuses/show/$i.xml
sleep 1
done