Why Does My Infinite Bash Loop Stop After Resuming?

Ctrl-Z sends a SIGTSTP signal, which stops the process and might cause some unexpected outcomes with certain commands. It's a good idea to try trapping this signal in bash for your loop. You can use something like `trap 'echo You just pressed Ctrl Z' SIGTSTP`. This might help in dealing with the loop and signal interactions too.

The looping structure definitely requires a condition, but it should ideally keep running unless interrupted. It's curious that the exit status of `sleep` seems to disrupt this. If you replace `true` with something like `:`, that won't change the loop's continuity. I would suggest further testing to see if you can keep it running longer.

It looks like when you hit Ctrl-Z, the 'while' loop gets interrupted by a signal, which affects its ability to restart. You can try modifying your loop a bit by appending `; echo goodbye` to your command like this: `while true; do echo hello; sleep 1; done; echo goodbye`. When you hit Ctrl-Z in this case, you'll get the "goodbye" message. The reason it stops is that the sleep command exits with a non-zero code after the pause. It might be worth experimenting with putting your loop in a subshell to see if that helps.