RESERVED WORDS Reserved words are words that have a special meaning to the shell. The following words are recognized as reserved when unquoted and either the first word of a command (see SHELL GRAMMAR below), the third word of a case or select command (only in is valid), or the third word of a for command (only in and do are valid): ! case coproc do done elif else esac fi for function if in select then until while { } time [[ ]]