I wanted to output a string of all the ascii characters with the following command
for i in `seq 32 127`; do printf "%c" $i; done
The output of the above command is:
33333334444444444555555555566666666667777777777..............
It's the first (from the left) digit of each number.
Looking through this site I came across the answer to my problem How to print all printable ASCII chars in CLI?, however I still don't understand why my original snippet does not output the ascii characters as intended.
comp.unix.shell
thread on why it's the right thing;)