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Learn Linux Shell Scripting – Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

You're reading from   Learn Linux Shell Scripting – Fundamentals of Bash 4.4 A comprehensive guide to automating administrative tasks with the Bash shell

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Product type Paperback
Published in Dec 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781788995597
Length 452 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Sebastiaan Tammer Sebastiaan Tammer
Author Profile Icon Sebastiaan Tammer
Sebastiaan Tammer
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Toc

Table of Contents (20) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Introduction FREE CHAPTER 2. Setting Up Your Local Environment 3. Choosing the Right Tools 4. The Linux Filesystem 5. Understanding the Linux Permissions Scheme 6. File Manipulation 7. Hello World! 8. Variables and User Input 9. Error Checking and Handling 10. Regular Expressions 11. Conditional Testing and Scripting Loops 12. Using Pipes and Redirection in Scripts 13. Functions 14. Scheduling and Logging 15. Parsing Bash Script Arguments with getopts 16. Bash Parameter Substitution and Expansion 17. Tips and Tricks with Cheat Sheet 18. Assessments 19. Other Books You May Enjoy

The while loop


Now that we've got the if-then-else recap and advanced usage out of the way, it is time to discuss the first scripting loop: while. Look at the following definition, which should seem familiar after if-then-else:

WHILE condition-is-true DO thing-to-do DONE

The biggest difference between if and while is that while will perform the action many times, so long as the condition specified is still true. Because it is often not needed to have an unending loop, the action will regularly mutate something related at the condition. This basically means that the action in do will eventually cause the while condition to be false instead of true. Let's look at a simple example:

reader@ubuntu:~/scripts/chapter_11$ vim while-simple.sh 
reader@ubuntu:~/scripts/chapter_11$ cat while-simple.sh 
#!/bin/bash

#####################################
# Author: Sebastiaan Tammer
# Version: v1.0.0
# Date: 2018-10-27
# Description: Example of a while loop.
# Usage: ./while-simple.sh 
##################...
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