CHAPTER 3Looping and Branching

At the heart of any programming language are iteration and conditional execution. Iteration is the repetition of a section of code until a condition changes. Conditional execution is making a choice between two or more actions (one of which may be to do nothing) based on a condition.

In the shell, there are three types of loop (while, until, and for) and three types of conditional execution (if, case, and the conditional operators && and ||, which mean AND and OR, respectively). With the exception of for and case, the exit status of a command controls the behavior.

Exit Status

You can test the success of a command directly using the shell keywords while, until, and if or with the control operators && and ||. The ...

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