really retarded BASH shell scripting ?

Supp0rtLinux · 03-28-2003, 12:46 AM

I'm not a Linux newbie, so I feel stupid asking this, but...

Using BASH to create shell scripts, I see lots of reference to:

for i in...
do
echo $i
done

My retarded question is is the "i" a shell special character thingy? Or is it just common usage/example kind of like all C books start out with helloworld.c? Could I safely do:

for x in...
do
echo $x
done

Would that work? Or is'i' itself special? If "i" is special, is it a special character like an * or an @? Or is it a built-in or something else?

whansard · 03-28-2003, 12:57 AM

the i is just common.
i remember learning some basic code in
the late 70's, and they were using i
in the for loops.