Bash Scripting – Using Awk with Column Numbers

Awk is the wrong solution here. How about:

if [[ "$task" =~ ^Clean ]]; then
  echo hello
fi

There's also a sneaky substitution method:

if [ "${task/#Clean/}" != "$task" ]; then
  echo hello
fi

But I find that to be far less readable.

Chris reckons case is tidier... let's try that out:

case $task in
  Clean*)
    echo hello
    ;;
esac

My aesthetic sense says "hell no with bells on", and fiddling with the formatting (Clean*) echo hello;; or similar) won't help much, IMAO. If you want a conditional, use an if, I say.

I don't think a command or shell builtin for this exists, as it's a trivial subset of what the Bourne shell for loop is designed for and implementing a command like this yourself is therefore quite simple.

Per JimB's suggestion, use the Bash builtin for generating sequences:

for i in {1..10}; do command; done

For very old versions of bash, you can use the seq command:

for i in `seq 10`; do command; done

This iterates ten times executing command each time - it can be a pipe or a series of commands separated by ; or &&. You can use the $i variable to know which iteration you're in.

If you consider this one-liner a script and so for some unspecified (but perhaps valid) reason undesireable you can implement it as a command, perhaps something like this on your .bashrc (untested):

#function run
run() {
    number=$1
    shift
    for i in `seq $number`; do
      $@
    done
}

Usage:

run 10 command

Example:

run 5 echo 'Hello World!'