Book Image

Learn Linux Shell Scripting – Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

By : Sebastiaan Tammer
Book Image

Learn Linux Shell Scripting – Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

By: Sebastiaan Tammer

Overview of this book

Shell scripts allow us to program commands in chains and have the system execute them as a scripted event, just like batch files. This book will start with an overview of Linux and Bash shell scripting, and then quickly deep dive into helping you set up your local environment, before introducing you to tools that are used to write shell scripts. The next set of chapters will focus on helping you understand Linux under the hood and what Bash provides the user. Soon, you will have embarked on your journey along the command line. You will now begin writing actual scripts instead of commands, and will be introduced to practical applications for scripts. The final set of chapters will deep dive into the more advanced topics in shell scripting. These advanced topics will take you from simple scripts to reusable, valuable programs that exist in the real world. The final chapter will leave you with some handy tips and tricks and, as regards the most frequently used commands, a cheat sheet containing the most interesting flags and options will also be provided. After completing this book, you should feel confident about starting your own shell scripting projects, no matter how simple or complex the task previously seemed. We aim to teach you how to script and what to consider, to complement the clear-cut patterns that you can use in your daily scripting challenges.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction
Index

Loop control


At this point, you should feel comfortable with using while and for loops. There is one more, rather important, topic to discuss with regards to loops: loop control. Loop control is a generic term, for anything that you do to, well, control the loop! However, there are two keywords that we'll need if we want to unleash the full power of loops: break and continue. We'll start with break.

Breaking the loop

For some scripting logic, it will prove necessary to break out of the loop. You might imagine that, in one of your scripts, you are waiting for something to finish. As soon as that happens, you want to do something. Waiting and periodically checking inside a while true loop could be an option for this, but if you recall in the while-interactive.sh script, we exited on the successful answer to the riddle. On an exit, we cannot run any more commands that are outside of the while loop! This is where break comes into play. It allows us to exit the loop, but continue the script. First...