What does ForDoDone do?

The for ; do ; done; programmatical syntax is also known as a “for loop.” As is the case with many systems admininstration tasks, you have to do things over and over again, to many servers, files, directories, objects, etc. A for loop allows you to automate the process, and iterate over a multitude of items, until the work is done. The for loop exists in most every programming language I can think of, but as it’s named and used here it’s mostly in reference to Bash, as it’s the most common shell for Linux commandline interaction.

Here is a very simple example of a for loop:

# for i in apple orange banana; do echo "$i"; done;
apple
orange
banana
#

As you can see it takes a list of fruits, and prints each member of the list.

I chose this name for this blog out of respect, nay: reverence for the for loop construct. It has saved my finger muscles, my sanity, my servers, and perhaps my job on several occasions.

I suppose the easiest way to describe what I am trying to do here is this:

for i in `find /thoughts -type f`;
do 
  post_thought_blog $i;
done;