Break and Continue
The break
command jumps out
of the nearest enclosing loop. Consider this simple script called
myscript
:
for name in Tom Jack Harry do echo $name echo "again" done echo "all done" $ ./myscript Tom again Jack again Harry again all done
Now with a break
:
for name in Tom Jack Harry
do
echo $name
if [ "$name" = "Jack" ]
then
break
fi
echo "again"
done
echo "all done"
$ ./myscript
Tom
again
Jack The break occurs after this line
all done
The continue
command forces a
loop to jump to its next iteration.
for name in Tom Jack Harry
do
echo $name
if [ "$name" = "Jack" ]
then
continue
fi
echo "again"
done
echo "all done"
$ ./myscript
Tom
again
Jack The continue occurs after this line
Harry
again
all done
break
and continue
also accept a numeric argument
(break
N
, continue
N
) to
control multiple layers of loops (e.g., jump out of
N
layers of loops), but this kind of
scripting leads to spaghetti code and we don’t recommend it.
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