How to break out of a loop in Bash?

Question

I want to write a Bash script to process text, which might require a while loop.

For example, a while loop in C:

int done = 0; while(1) {   ...   if(done) break; } 

I want to write a Bash script equivalent to that. But what I usually used and as all the classic examples I read have showed, is this:

while read something; do ... done 

It offers no help about how to do while(1){} and break;, which is well defined and widely used in C, and I do not have to read data for stdin.

Could anyone help me with a Bash equivalent of the above C code?

Answer 1

It's not that different in bash.

workdone=0 while : ; do   ...   if [ "$workdone" -ne 0 ]; then       break   fi done 

: is the no-op command; its exit status is always 0, so the loop runs until workdone is given a non-zero value.

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There are many ways you could set and test the value of workdone in order to exit the loop; the one I show above should work in any POSIX-compatible shell.