while loop is a basic construct in many programming languages. Bash also allows us to use it to iterate over many things. Learn here how!

The syntax of while loop is the following:

while test-commands; do consequent-commands; done

The loop is executed as long as test-commands has zero exit status. Return status of the loop is return status of the last command or zero if no command was executed.

Here’s an example:

#!/bin/bash

echo "Number of params passed to the script: $#"

function param_printer() {
    # $# is number of params passed to the function!
    while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
        echo "Parameter inside a function: ${1}"
        # shift parameters by 1 effectively dropping the first one:
        shift
    done
}

# Pass all script parameters to the function:
param_printer $@

# $# contains number of parameters
while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
    # print the first parameter
    echo "Parameter: ${1}"
    # shift parameters by 1 effectively dropping the first one:
    shift
done

Note that function param_printer operates on a copy of parameters and shift doesn’t change the original script parameters!

Run the script and pass different number of arguments to how it works:

$> ./while-loop.sh
Number of params passed to the script: 0
$> ./while-loop.sh a b c
Number of params passed to the script: 3
Parameter inside a function: a
Parameter inside a function: b
Parameter inside a function: c
Parameter: a
Parameter: b
Parameter: c

The while loop is very often used in Bash to process script parameters. We’ll cover that in a future post. Stay tuned! :-)