Question

I am running the following command on ubuntu:

taskset -c 1 ./forLoop

and its giving me the following error:

./forLoop: 1: Syntax error: Bad for loop variable

What is in forLoop is the following:

for ((  i = 0 ;  i <= 1000000;  i++  ))
do
  echo "Welcome $i times"
done

simply ./forLoop does execute by itself but I want to attach the process to a certain affinity. Can I ?

Answer 1

This is likely happening because you’re on Ubuntu and the interpreter called dash gets invoked instead of bash.

Trivially, type this to confirm:

dash ./forLoop    

You should see the same “for loop” error.

Some of the ways to fix this problem:

• Force `bash` to be used: `taskset -c 1 bash ./foo.sh`
• Write `#!/bin/bash` as the first line of your script.
• Alter the loop code to be dash-compatible, as described in the below link.

Read more here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh/