When you write statements such as while or if, you should indent your code. This involves lining up the keywords for your statement and indenting the commands inside the statement. For example, with an if statement, format the code in the following way: if [ "$answer" = "yes" ] then echo "You answered yes" else echo "You did not answer yes" fi
The keywords of the if statement, if, then, else, fi are easily seen in the statement. The statements inside, the two echo commands, are indented by two spaces. If you have one statement inside another, keep indenting. The following sample code shows several if statements nested inside a while loop. while [ $answer != "quit" ] do echo "enter a number: " read num if [ "$num" = 1 ] then echo "you entered a one" fi if [ "$num" = 2 ] then echo "you entered a two" fi done
It is easy to see the do and done statements in the while loop above. This makes it easier to understand what your code is doing and easier to locate the beginning and end of this loop. It is clear that the if statements are inside the while loop because they are indented two spaces inside the loop.