Bourne Shell (/bin/sh) counting?

[Richard John Botting]

Jeff <postnews at cvbnetprime.com> Asks
>  What is the best way to provide a loop counter in a Bourne
>  shell script? An example script is below, all it needs is
>  the count incrementer.

>      #!/bin/sh
>      count=0
[...]
>        # <increment count here>
>       echo count=$count
Some people think that this answer is best thought of as a techie joke...
	count=`expr $count + 1`
              ^    ^      ^ ^ ^   
The spaces a VERY significant, as are the reversed quotes. However it works
and is useful in several of scripts.

This is even funnier:
	count=` echo $count|awk '{print $1 + 1}'`

I'd like to see a neat solution (other than a "increment.c" program).

Dick Botting, 
Department of computer science,
California State University, San Bernardino, CA 92407

rbottin at atl.calstate.edu
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