I have several scripts that auto-increment a number in a data table. That’s not hard to do on the command line. But what if I wanted to have version letters at the end of mixed letter-number codes, like 101a, 101b, 101c etc? And also wanted to increment version numbers after a letter cycle, like 101c, 101d, 102a, 102b…? As is usually the case with command-line operations, there’s more than one way to do it. This post looks at a couple of solutions to this particular problem, namely incrementing (single) version letters and version numbers on a fixed letter cycle.

Source: LXer – Auto-incrementing version letters