Padding zeros in a string

Question

I\'m writing a bash script to get some podcasts. The problem is that some of the podcast numbers are one digits while others are two/three digits, therefore I need to pad t

Answer 1

Use backticks to assign the result of the printf command (``):

n=1
wget http://aolradio.podcast.aol.com/sn/SN-`printf %03d $n`.mp3

EDIT: Note that i removed one line which was not really necessary. If you want to assign the output of 'printf %...' to n, you could use

n=`printf %03d $n`

and after that, use the $n variable substitution you used before.