Bash While Loop Example

Q. How do I use bash while loop to repeat certain task under Linux / UNIX operating system?

A. Bash while loop is a control flow statement that allows code or commands to be executed repeatedly based on a given condition. For example, run echo command 5 times or read text file line by line or evaluate the options passed on the command line for a script.

while loop syntax

while [ condition ]
do
   command1
   command2
   command3
done

command1 to command3 will be executed repeatedly till condition is true. The argument for a while loop can be any boolean expression. Infinite loops occur when the conditional never evaluates to false. For example following while loop will print welcome 5 times on screen:

#!/bin/bash
x=1
while [ $x -le 5 ]
do
  echo "Welcome $x times"
  x=$(( $x + 1 ))
done

Here is a sample shell code to calculate factorial using while loop:

#!/bin/bash
counter=$1
factorial=1
while [ $counter -gt 0 ]
do
   factorial=$(( $factorial * $counter ))
   counter=$(( $counter - 1 ))
done
echo $factorial

To run just type:
$ chmod +x script.sh
$ ./script.sh 5
Output:

120

While loops are frequently used for reading data line by line from file:

#!/bin/bash
FILE=$1
# read $FILE using the file descriptors
exec 3<&0
exec 0<$FILE
while read line
do
	# use $line variable to process line
	echo $line
done
exec 0<&3

You can easily evaluate the options passed on the command line for a script using while loop:

......
..
while getopts ae:f:hd:s:qx: option
do
        case "${option}"
        in
                a) ALARM="TRUE";;
                e) ADMIN=${OPTARG};;
                d) DOMAIN=${OPTARG};;
                f) SERVERFILE=$OPTARG;;
                s) WHOIS_SERVER=$OPTARG;;
                q) QUIET="TRUE";;
                x) WARNDAYS=$OPTARG;;
                \?) usage
                    exit 1;;
        esac
done
.......
..

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