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 confusing code and we don’t recommend it.
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