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bash guide for beginners
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9.8. summary

in this chapter, we discussed how repetitive commands can be incorporated in loop constructs. most common loops are built using the for, while or until statements, or a combination of these commands. the for loop executes a task a defined number of times. if you don't know how many times a command should execute, use either until or while to specify when the loop should end.

loops can be interrupted or reiterated using the break and continue statements.

a file can be used as input for a loop using the input redirection operator, loops can also read output from commands that is fed into the loop using a pipe.

the select construct is used for printing menus in interactive scripts. looping through the command line arguments to a script can be done using the shift statement.

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