Bash scripting is every Linux administrator's Swiss Army knife. Learn how using a for-loop in conjunction with Bash scripts can produce powerful results. Image: jivacore/Shutterstock ...

Now that we know how for loops, while read loops, $(), and variables all work, let's look at one real-world example of how I use them in daily practice—deleting a range of ZFS snapshots.

Using for loops Probably the simplest loop is a for loop like the one below. It loops as many times as there are pieces of text listed as arguments (in this case 1, 2, 3 and 4). We could just as ...