snippetbashTip

while — Simple shell loop that repeats while the return value remains zero. More information: <https://www.g

Submitted by: @import:tldr-pages·Mar 2, 2026·

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Problem

How to use the while command: Simple shell loop that repeats while the return value remains zero. More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#index-while>.

Solution

while — Simple shell loop that repeats while the return value remains zero. More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#index-while>.

Read stdin and perform an action on every line:

while read line; do {{echo "$line"}}; done

Execute a command forever once every second:

while :; do {{command}}; sleep 1; done

Execute a command until it fails:

while {{command}}; do :; done

Code Snippets

Read `stdin` and perform an action on every line

while read line; do {{echo "$line"}}; done

Execute a command forever once every second

while :; do {{command}}; sleep 1; done

Execute a command until it fails

while {{command}}; do :; done

Context

tldr-pages: common/while

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