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

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 
##################...