Question

I have a loop in my KornShell (ksh) script that I want to execute at least once, and I want an elegant way of doing it, however while I have found plenty of stuff on how to write a while loop, there does not seem to be anything for a do…while loop out there.

What I am doing is reading in a comma-delimited list of files from a configuration file and processing them. If the list of files is empty, then I want to process all files in the directory.

What is a good way to do this?

EDIT: Here is what I have currently. I grab the filename, then remove it from the string for the next pass. If the list of Files is empty, I quit the loop. BUT, if the list is empty to begin with, I want it to still run once.

  while [[ -n "${FILES%%,*}" ]]; do
       FILE="${FILES%%,*}"                             
       FILES="${FILES#*,}"
  done

Answer 1

you could fake it:

do_once=true
while $do_once || [[ other condition ]]; do
  : your stuff here

  do_once=false
done