Perl Power - Sequential Iteration in shell scripts

Lets say you want to process a bunch of files containing a numeric sequence like "inventory000297.txt" through "inventory000302.txt". You would like to print the following:

inventory000297.txt
inventory000298.txt
inventory000299.txt
inventory000300.txt
inventory000301.txt
inventory000302.txt

I did not see a simple way to do this using a plain shell script, but adding some perl is a different story...

for F in $(perl -e 'foreach $num (297 .. 302) {printf("%s%06i%s\n","inventory",$num,".txt");}')
do
    echo ${F}
done

Notes to keep in mind:

• $( ) contains the perl one-liner that generates the output to print
• The perl script is between the single quotes
• The foreach loop block is within braces { }
• The numerical range is in parenthesis ( 297 .. 302 ), change this as necessary
  
• The printf has 3 format specifiers:
  
  %s corresponds with "inventory", change prefix as necessary
  
  %06i corresponds with $num, a fixed width 6 digit integer, change as necessary
  
  %s corresponds with the ".txt", change extension as necessary

Adjust the size of your sequence number - if 15 digits is needed you would use %015i for the format. That leading 0 says fill in with leading zeros on output to match the specified width.

Enjoy!