R's paste function equivalent in BASH? - r

Question

I'm trying to translate this piece of R code into bash:
year <- 2010
emmissions <- paste("Emmision table from ",year, sep="")
em_table <- read.table(emmissions, head=F, as.is=T)
for (i in 1:nrow(em_table)) {
print(em_table[i,1])
}
But can't figure out how to translate paste function to concatenate string with variable. Expected outcome would be this script translated into bash code.

Answer 1

Using perhaps echo "Emmision table from ${year}" inside your for loop something like below:
for var in 2001 2003 2004;
do
echo "Emission table ${var}"
done
Updated on OP's request:
for sequence generation in bash , one can do : for i in {1..5} for a sequence of 1 to 5 or {0..20..4} for a step size of 4 from a sequence of 0 to 20
Assuming a column like structure, one can do this:
Assuming a table which has two column saved in a text file
col1 col2
1 2
3 4
5 6
while read col1 col2
do
echo "Col1 : $col1"
echo "Col2 : $col2"
done < table.txt

Answer 2

There already is an accepted answer but here is a awk solution.
Tested with just one file, named "test2020".
for var in 2020;
do
awk '{print $1}' "test${var}"
done
Output:
1
2
3
To read both columns the awk code line would be
awk '{print $1 $2}' "test${var}"
or, since the OP says the files only have two columns,
awk '{print $0}' "test${var}"
The file contents are:
1 a
2 b
3 c