19.6.1 while Statement

The while statement is the simplest loop construct. It looks like this:

while (test)
  body

Here, body is a statement (often a nested block) to repeat, and test is the test expression that controls whether to repeat it again. Each iteration of the loop starts by computing test and, if it is true (nonzero), that means the loop should execute body again and then start over.

Here’s an example of advancing to the last structure in a chain of structures chained through the next field:

#include <stddef.h> /* Defines NULL. */
…
while (chain->next != NULL)
  chain = chain->next;

This code assumes the chain isn’t empty to start with; if the chain is empty (that is, if chain is a null pointer), the code gets a SIGSEGV signal trying to dereference that null pointer (see Signals).