Practical UNIX

Looping

You will often have a list of items in your script that will each need to have a particular action performed on them. The for loop construct can help with this. Its general form is as follows:

for variable in list-of-items...
do
   command
   ...
done

Here, variable gets set to each value in the list-of-items, and each command is run for each variable. Here is a simple example:

for FILE in acme1 report7 /tmp/junk5
do
   lp $FILE && rm $FILE
done

The previous code will print a hard copy of the three files in the list of items: acme1, report7, and /tmp/junk5. If the lp command does not generate an error, the code will then delete the file.

You can use backquotes to generate a much larger list of items to print and then remove. In the following example, ...