Manual Pages  — SEQ

seq – print sequences of numbers

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION EXIT STATUS EXAMPLES SEE ALSO HISTORY BUGS

seq [-w] [-f format] [-s string] [-t string] [first [incr]] last

The seq utility prints a sequence of numbers, one per line (default), from first (default 1), to near last as possible, in increments of incr (default 1). When first is larger than last, the default incr is -1.

All numbers are interpreted as floating point.

Normally integer values are printed as decimal integers.

The seq utility accepts the following options:

-f format , --format format
	Use a printf(3) style format to print each number. Only the A, a, E, e, F, f, G, g, and % conversion characters are valid, along with any optional flags and an optional numeric minimum field width or precision. The format can contain character escape sequences in backslash notation as defined in -ansiC. The default is %g.
-s string , --separator string
	Use string to separate numbers. The string can contain character escape sequences in backslash notation as defined in -ansiC. The default is \n.
-t string , --terminator string
	Use string to terminate sequence of numbers. The string can contain character escape sequences in backslash notation as defined in -ansiC. This option is useful when the default separator does not contain a \n.
-w -, --fixed-width
	Equalize the widths of all numbers by padding with zeros as necessary. This option has no effect with the -f option. If any sequence numbers will be printed in exponential notation, the default conversion is changed to %e.

The utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

# seq 1 3
1
2
3

# seq 3 1
3
2
1

# seq -w 0 .05 .1
0.00
0.05
0.10

The seq command first appeared in Version 8 AT&T . A seq command appeared in NetBSD and was ported to FreeBSD 9.0 . This command was based on the command of the same name in Plan 9 from Bell Labs and the GNU core utilities. The GNU seq command first appeared in the 1.13 shell utilities release.

The -w option does not handle the transition from pure floating point to exponent representation very well. The seq command is not bug for bug compatible with other implementations.