I want to write a Bash script to process text, which might require a while loop.
For example, a while loop in C:
int done = 0; while(1) { ... if(done) break; } I want to write a Bash script equivalent to that. But what I usually used and as all the classic examples I read have showed, is this:
while read something; do ... done It offers no help about how to do while(1){} and break;, which is well defined and widely used in C, and I do not have to read data for stdin.
Could anyone help me with a Bash equivalent of the above C code?
2 Answers
It's not that different in bash.
workdone=0 while : ; do ... if [ "$workdone" -ne 0 ]; then break fi done : is the no-op command; its exit status is always 0, so the loop runs until workdone is given a non-zero value.
There are many ways you could set and test the value of workdone in order to exit the loop; the one I show above should work in any POSIX-compatible shell.
while true ; do ... if [ something ]; then break fi done 
