Chris Down wrote: > On 2013-03-18 00:46, Linda Walsh wrote: >> Bruce Dawson wrote: >>> Chris Down pointed that out. My loop now looks like this -- portable (I >>> believe) and fast: >>> >>> BashCount() { >>> for (( i = $1 ; i > 0 ; i-- )); do >>> : >>> done >>> echo Just did $1 iterations using bash math >>> } >> ---- >> To do the above, you'd want to pre-init > > There is no need to preinitialise the variable, I'm not sure why you think it > is > necessary.
the above pre-inits "i to $i" before the loop. If you want to make the loop portable, it seems some variation on while would be necessary, thus the need to pre-init the value to the count before going into the while, maybe: n=10;while [ $((n-=1)) != 0]; do echo $n;done