Loops are one of the fundamental concepts of programming languages. Loops are handy when you want to run a series of commands over and over again until a specific condition is met.
In scripting languages such as Bash, loops are useful for automating repetitive tasks. There are 3 basic loop constructs in Bash scripting, for loop, while loop, and until loop.
This tutorial explains the basics of the until loop in Bash.
Bash until Loop
The until loop is used to execute a given set of commands as long as the given condition evaluates to false.
The Bash until loop takes the following form:
until [CONDITION]
do
[COMMANDS]
done
The condition is evaluated before executing the commands. If the condition evaluates to false, commands are executed. Otherwise, if the condition evaluates to true the loop will be terminated and the program control will be passed to the command that follows.
In the example below, on each iteration the loop prints the current value of the variable counter
and increments the variable by one.
#!/bin/bash
counter=0
until [ $counter -gt 5 ]
do
echo Counter: $counter
((counter ))
done
The loop iterates as long as the counter
variable has a value greater than four. The script will produce the following output:
Counter: 0
Counter: 1
Counter: 2
Counter: 3
Counter: 4
Counter: 5
Bash until Loop Example
The following script may be useful if your git host is having downtime and instead of manually typing git pull
multiple times until the host is online you can run the script once. It will try to pull the repository until it is successfully pulled.
#!/bin/bash
until git pull &> /dev/null
do
echo "Waiting for the git host ..."
sleep 1
done
echo -e "nThe git repository is pulled."
The script will print “Waiting for the git host …” and sleep for one second until the git host goes online. Once the repository is pulled it will print “The git repository is pulled.”.
Waiting for the git host ...
Waiting for the git host ...
Waiting for the git host ...
The git repository is pulled.
Conclusion
The while
and until
loops are similar to each other with the main difference being that the while
loop iterates as long as the condition evaluates to true
and the until
loop iterates as long as the condition evaluates to false
.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment.