The options are as follows:
The last four arguments indicate, respectively, the number of data, the lower bound, the upper bound, and the step size or, for random data, the seed. While at least one of them must appear, any of the other three may be omitted, and will be considered as such if given as `-' Any three of these arguments determines the fourth. If four are specified and the given and computed values of reps conflict, the lower value is used. If fewer than three are specified, defaults are assigned left to right, except for s which assumes its default unless both begin and end are given.
Defaults for the four arguments are, respectively, 100, 1, 100, and 1, except that when random data are requested, s defaults to a seed depending upon the time of day. reps is expected to be an unsigned integer, and if given as zero is taken to be infinite. begin and end may be given as real numbers or as characters representing the corresponding value in ASCII. The last argument must be a real number.
Random numbers are obtained through random(3). The name jot derives in part from iota, a function in APL.
jot 21 -1 1.00
prints 21 evenly spaced numbers increasing from -1 to 1. The ASCII character set is generated with
jot -c 128 0
and the strings xaa through xaz with
jot -w xa%c 26 a
while 20 random 8-letter strings are produced with
"jot -r -c 160 a z | rs -g 0 8"
Infinitely many yes(1)'s may be obtained through
jot -b yes 0
and thirty ed(1) substitution commands applying to lines 2, 7, 12, etc. is the result of
jot -w %ds/old/new/ 30 2 - 5
The stuttering sequence 9, 9, 8, 8, 7, etc. can be produced by suitable choice of precision and step size, as in
jot 0 9 - -.5
and a file containing exactly 1024 bytes is created with
jot -b x 512 > block
Finally, to set tabs four spaces apart starting from column 10 and ending in column 132, use
expand -`jot -s, - 10 132 4`
and to print all lines 80 characters or longer,
grep `jot -s "" -b . 80`