Hi again! I saw my first post made it to the list eventually as well. Sorry for the duplicate. I hadn't realized that the newsgroup was moderated.
I'm a bit dishearted at the lack of response. On IRC many people pointed out that usually this kind of issue can be solved by passing a sequence to printf. Now I've come up with a real life example that isn't easy to hack together using printf: wget -x http://some.really.long/url/prefix/{,{000..123}.{html,jpg}} There have been some concerns about changing the behaviour and thus breaking existing scripts. The preferred solution in this case would be to use "..." instead of ".." if one wanted to activate this feature. Personally I believe that zero padded sequences in an existing application that cares for the exact string and not only the numeric value are so unlikely that adding another piece of syntax is not worth the trouble, but I'd like your opinion on this. Another thing worth mentioning is negative numbers. My padding pads all numbers to a common width, not a common number of digits. This is what printf does, and it's a wee little bit easier to implement. However it could be changed to common number of digits as well. On IRC I got the idea that {-07..003} should do common width, whereas {-007..003} should do common number of digits. This, however, would add a lot of code. I think negative numbers are so rare that they are not worth the effort. Do you agree? I hope to generate some feedback here. If you think this useful, tell me about it, and I'll try a bit harder to get this into the offical sources. If I get no single answer this time as well, I'll probably post the patch somewhere online, patch my own version of bash, and that's it. Greetings, Martin von Gagern
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