uutils / uutils/coreutils

seq: additional feature: ranges of letters

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U - seq
Dominant language
Rust
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Feature description

seq supports ranges of letters in addition to numbers

e.g.:

$ seq -s ' ' b
a b
$ seq -s ' ' b e
b c d d 
$ seq -s ' '  F 2 L
F H J L

-s and -w will not be supported with letter ranges for obvious reasons.
Increment still has to be a number.
If the start argument is a letter, the end argument also has to be a letter of the same case.

Am I willing to implement this?

Yes

Additional Context

Fish shell doesn't have ranges with [] like bash -c 'echo [a-z]* [1-3]*' and instead suggests to use seq, however seq doesn't support letters.

If you don't want this in uutils, I may create a separate seq tool that supports this.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the seq implementation and its existing numeric range handling. Define the letter-range cases described in the issue, including case matching, numeric increments, and the stated -s and -w restrictions; done means these examples and boundary cases behave consistently.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
cli
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
52/100

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