CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unixif-statementfor-loop
C Gretter
C Gretter

Reputation: 9

Using an IF ELSE statement inside a FOR loop in UNIX

I'm trying to use an IF/ELSE statement inside a FOR loops to generate two output files: count1 with numbers 1-5; count2 with numbers 6-10

I am trying

for i in {1..10}
do
        if [ $i -le 5 ]
        then
                echo $i > count1.out
        else
                echo $i > count2.out
        fi
done

but count1 only has "5" in it and count2 shows "10"

How can I fix this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 510

Answers (2)

Cloud
Cloud

Reputation: 19333

You are using the truncate-redirect operator, >.

You likely intended to use the append-redirect operator, >>.

Consider reading up on BASh I/O redirection in general. It will help you a lot with understanding shell scripts.

Upvotes: 1

user462356
user462356

Reputation:

Using > to redirect to a file replaces the whole content of the file. What you actually want to do is append to the file, which you can do with >> like so:

echo "hello " > somefile.out # replace the contents of whatever is in somefile.out
echo "world!" >> somefile.out # append more stuff to somefile.out

More info here: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Redirections.html

Upvotes: 1

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