I guess the meaning of the title is far from obvious, but I wasn't able to come up with a better one.

So this is only for practice purposes.

Given several files under a directory, I'm trying to add some string, text, whatever to each one, so that each string is unique. For instance, file1 should contain the text "filea", file2, the text "fileb" and so on.

What I tried obviously didn't work:
All files have identical content

Not really sure why you thought this would yield different data when all the work is being done inside the loop.

Ultimately the issue I see here is that you would need to know ahead of time how many files you have in the directory? reason being is that your current example, if it worked, would only do so for 6 or less
files as the moment you encounter a seventh file you would be back to 'filea' and hence no unique string.

So you may need to provide more information on what you know prior to running the script before we can help you further??

I will add that the use of ls in a for loop is an enormous no no ... use the simple glob metacharacter as it will not have any of the word splitting issues of your current example:

1 members found this post helpful.

There's a random number of files in a directory. I don't need a particular number. Let's say 10, if it's essential to solving the problem.
I'm simply experimenting, I'm trying to add succesive strings of the {a..z} (braces) type to the content of these 10 files. Ok, I understand that if it's 10 files, then I'd need something like {a..j}. So how do I add "a" to "file1", "b" to "file2" and so on, and so forth?

I don't need the answer, I need to know how to approach the problem. The solution is obviously very different from what I've tried, but I've no clue whatsoever.

I would place your alphabet in an array which can then be echoed to each file and an increment made to the counter. Again this will only work for 26 files, so an additional part of your code might
need to be a count of just how many files there are so you know ahead of time if the answer will be unique or not.

Well, I'm still not very familiar with arrays, so I'm going to have to read a little bit more before going any further. Thanks.