We have begun to make progress within this chapter. We have been able to join many of the elements that we have previously used into cohesive and functional scripts. Although the focus of this chapter has been on loops, we have used command-line lists, if statements, case statements, and arithmetic calculations.

We opened this chapter describing loops as the workhorse of our scripts and we have been able to demonstrate this with for, while, and until loops. The for loop is used to iterate through elements of a list. The list can be either static or dynamic, with an emphasis on dynamic lists we showed how simply these are created via file globbing or command expansion.

The while and until loops are controlled using conditions. The while loop will loop whilst the supplied condition is true. The until loop will loop until the supplied condition returns true or whilst it returns false. The continue and break keywords are specific to loops and along with exit, we can control the loop flow.

In the next chapter, we will look at modulizing scripts using functions.