How to add leading zeros for for-loop in shell?

seq -w will detect the max input width and normalize the width of the output.

for num in $(seq -w 01 05); do
    ...
done

At time of writing this didn't work on the newest versions of OSX, so you can either install macports and use its version of seq, or you can set the format explicitly:

seq -f '%02g' 1 3
    01
    02
    03

But given the ugliness of format specifications for such a simple problem, I prefer the solution Henk and Adrian gave, which just uses Bash. Apple can't screw this up since there's no generic "unix" version of Bash:

echo {01..05}

Or:

for number in {01..05}; do ...; done

Use the following syntax:

$ for i in {01..05}; do echo "$i"; done
01
02
03
04
05

Disclaimer: Leading zeros only work in >=bash-4.

If you want to use printf, nothing prevents you from putting its result in a variable for further use:

$ foo=$(printf "%02d" 5)
$ echo "${foo}"
05