For Loop Is Failing

[shanenin]

I was just messing around using a for loop. I would assume my for loop would work on every item in this substitution `ps -Ao comm`, it does not. As soon as I enter "yes" in my input, it executes the command echo $i, then stops. Why is it not looping until every item in `ps -Ao comm` has been used as a variable?

#!/bin/bash

for i in $(ps -Ao comm)
do echo "do you want to kill the following process [y/n], or enter [exit] to quit"
echo $i
read IN
case $IN in
[yY]|[yY][eE][sS]) exec echo $i;;
[nN]|[nN][oO]) echo "continuing to next process";;
exit) exit;;
*) echo "process ignored, continuing to next";;
esac
done

one more thing, the command "exec" seems useless. What purpose does it serve?

[shanenin]

the exec was my problem. I have this link that explains why

http://www.faqs.org/docs/abs/HTML/internal.html#EX54

I guess it does serve a purpose :-)

Edited May 23, 2005 by shanenin