Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

The for Statement

You use the for statement to execute a set of commands once each time a specified condition is true. The for statement has a number of formats. The first format used by pdksh and bash is as follows:

for curvar in listdo    statementsdone

You should use this form if you want to execute statements once for each value in list. For each iteration, the current value of the list is assigned to vcurvar. list can be a variable containing a number of items or a list of values separated by spaces. The second format is as follows:

for curvardo    statementsdone

In this form, the statements are executed once for each of the positional parameters passed to the shell program. For each iteration, the current value of the positional parameter ...