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Comment by yuubi | Hacker News Reader

For a vaguely similar use case (repeat till host is up) I once wrote

    until ssh ...; do sleep 5; done

which stops looping once a connection succeeds.

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  while :;do ssh ... && break; sleep 5; done

Why? That reminds me of the

    while(1) {
        if (condition)
            break;
        ...
    }

stuff I've seen too much of and can't explain, instead of just while(!condition) { ... }.

I'm not much of C programmer but I think it's an approximation of an infinite loop.

   for(;;){
         if(condition) break;
   }

Yes, that looks exactly analogous, but my question is why people don't use the perfectly good built-in conditional termination in a while or for loop and instead add on an if statement.

(Also, I don't understand why a for(;;) loop is more attractive than a while(1) loop.)

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