Bash break and continue

Loops allow you to run one or more commands multiple times until a certain condition is met. However, sometimes you may need to alter the flow of the loop and terminate the loop or only the current iteration.

In Bash, break and continue statements allows you to control the loop execution.

Bash break Statement

The break statement terminates the current loop and passes program control to the command that follows the terminated loop. It is used to exit from a for, while, [until](https://linuxize.com/post/bash-until-loop/), or select loop. s The syntax of the break statement takes the following form:

break [n]

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[n] is an optional argument and must be greater than or equal to 1. When [n] is provided, the n-th enclosing loop is exited. break 1 is equivalent to break.

To better understand how to use the break statement, let’s take a look at the following examples.

In the script below, the execution of the [while](https://linuxize.com/post/bash-while-loop/) loop will be interrupted once the current iterated item is equal to 2:

i=0

while [[ $i -lt 5 ]]
do
  echo "Number: $i"
  ((i++))
  if [[ $i -eq 2 ]]; then
    break
  fi
done

echo 'All Done!'

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Number: 0
Number: 1
All Done!

#bash #bash break #bash continue statement