Running a program continuously (forever) using looping constructs or recursion

So far, this cookbook has mostly shown scripts that serve a single purpose and exit upon task completion. This is great for single use scripts, but what about if we wanted to have scripts execute multiple scripts through a menu, or perform tasks in the background automatically forever without being executed each time by scheduling processes (like cron)? This recipe introduces a few ways for a script to run forever until it is killed or exits.

Getting ready

Besides having a terminal open, we need to remember a few concepts:

• Recursive functions combined with a prompt (for example, the read command) can result in a script that loops based on user...