Shell Programming and Scripting

But the standard way of increment without evaluating will work as you expect always.

Code:

+ counter=-1
+ typeset -li counter
counter=$(( counter + 1 ))
+ counter=0
echo $counter $?
+ echo 0 0
0 0

thanks people for helping me understand the subtleties. I think for the sake of clarity, I'm just going to use something like:

Code:

if [[ -f "$file" ]] ; then
	(( counter++ ))
	continue
fi

For the sake of clarity, *I* would write it like this:

Code:

if [[ -f "$file" ]]
then
  (( counter++ ))
elif [[ -e $file ]]
then
  echo "$file is not a plain file, but $(file $file)"
else
  echo "$file disappeared"
fi

This message is probably clearer than "should never get here" ;-)

For the sake of clarity i suggest you stay away from keywords like "continue" and "break" as long as possible and use them only as a very last resort. You see, both are basically variants of the GOTO and we know how we feel about GOTO, don't we?

In your example code i don't even understand what the "continue" should accomplish: the case-part already finishes at this point and the next iteration of the for-loop will start anyway, so the difference is perhaps the time it takes to execute the "fi", the ";;" and the "next" - is it only me or should that really be negligible?

I hope this helps.

bakunin