while Command while Execute commands repeatedly while sequence1 [do sequence2] done The shell construct while controls a loop. It first executes the commands in sequence1. If the exit status is zero, the shell ex- ecutes the commands in the optional sequence2 and repeats the process until the exit status of sequence1 is nonzero. Because the shell recognizes a reserved word only as the unquoted first word of a command, both do and done must occur unquoted at the start of a line or preceded by `;'. The shell commands break and continue may be used to alter con- trol flow within a while loop. The until construct has the same form as while, but the sense of the test is reversed. The shell executes while directly. ***** See Also ***** break, commands, continue, sh, test, until COHERENT Lexicon Page 1