While Loops

In this lecture, I am going to discuss While Loops.

Now, what I am going to do first is open PowerShell ISE as an Administrator.

Let's discuss what a While Loop is. A loop that will repeat a set of commands indefinitely until a condition is met.

It is somewhat similar to the For Loops except for the fact that a For Loop is just counting from 0 to 5, or 0 to 10, or whatever the number may be, and only repeat the set of instructions until a count is done.

A While Loop will run these instructions indefinitely until a condition is met.

If we were to write a For Loop you might remember we write it like this:

for ($i = 0; $i -lt 5; $i++) {

$i

}

If we execute this we get 0 through 4

And, if we want to repeat this in a While Loop we will type:

$i = 0

while ($i -lt 5) {

$I

$I++

}

If we execute this code we get the same result

You might be wondering, why would we ever use a While Loop if we can use a For Loop? Well, if you are going to be counting from 0 to 5 you want to use a For Loop but if you have other dependencies or other conditions there may be cases where you want to use a While Loop.

For example, let’s make a While Loop:

while ((Read-Host “Type ‘xyz’ to stop the loop”) -ne “xyz”) {

echo “You did not type ‘xyz’ so I am going to continue the loop”

}

So if we execute this script it will continue to run indefinitely until I enter “xyz”

Now, there’s also another way yo…