Question

Ok I know I’ve asked a similar question, I understand how to do an infinate loop:

while [ 1 ]
do
    foo
    bar
        then
sleep 10
done

But if I want to run some (quite a few) IF ELSE Statements in this loop how would I get the script to carry on looping once they had completed how would I go about this?

Answer 1

while :; do
    if cond1; then
        whatever
    elif cond2; then
        something else
    else
        break
    fi
done

1. You do infinite loop using while true or using true’s shorter alias :. [ 1 ] is needlessly complicated and is not what you think it is ([ 0 ] is also true!). Remember, the condition in if and while is arbitrary command whose exit status (zero = true, nonzero = false) is used as the condition value and [ is just alias for special test command (both built-in in most shells, but they don’t have to be).
2. Any shell construct is allowed between do/done including conditionals, more loops and cases.
3. Use break to terminate innermost loop from inside (just like most other languages).