while: command not found

Question

I'm trying to do this as an April Fool's prank: make a linux machine display a message in the shell every few seconds.

My thought is to achieve this by starting an infinite loop that runs as a background job (in .bashrc).

For example, this does what I want:

while true ; do echo Evil Message; sleep 10; done

In order to run it in background I tried:

cmd="while true ; do echo Evil Message; sleep 10;"
$cmd &

but this fails with the error:

while: command not found

Why do I get the error? Is there a way to make this script work?

Stéphane Chazelas · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-01 09:41:31Z

up vote 15 down vote accepted

while is not a command, it's a shell keyword. Keywords are recognised before variable expansion happens, so after the expansion, it's too late.

You have several options:

Don't use a variable at all.

while true ; do echo Evil Message; sleep 10; done &

Use eval to run the shell over the expanded value of the variable
```
eval "$cmd" &
```
Invoke a shell to run the loop
```
bash -c "$cmd" &
```

Use a function (that's what is typically used to store code):

cmd() { while true ; do echo Evil Message; sleep 10; done; }
cmd &

Stéphane Chazelas
105k13123256

answered yesterday

choroba
6,9141321

Bonus points if you pipe the echo string to the wall command, all logged in users will get it in their tty ;-) – Jake yesterday

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BenjiWiebe · Answer 2 · 2015-04-01 12:22:38Z

Another option (besides all the good options listed in choroba's answer) would be to run it in a subshell, like this:

(while true; do echo Evil Message; sleep 10; done;) &

This will cause bash to run another instance of itself running your code, in the background.

2 Answers 2