How to Exit For Loop in Shell Script

Shell Scripts allow you to loop through commands using for and while statements. But sometimes you may need to exit loops in between before completion. For this purpose, Linux provides you break statement. In this article, we will look at how to come out of for loop in shell script. You can use these steps for all Linux distributions since break statement is available in all Linux systems.

How to Exit For Loop in Shell Script

We will use break statement to come out of for loop (and while loop) in shell script. Here is the syntax of break statement.

break
OR
break N

We will look at three common use cases to exit loops

1. Using for statement
2. Using while statement
3. Using nested for statement

Exit For Loop

Here is a simple example (break.sh) to exit for loop using break statement. In the following statement, the for loop breaks if the variable i‘s value is equal to the one received using command line argument $1. Otherwise it continues with the loop.

#!/bin/sh

i=1
for $i < 10
do
 if [ $i -eq $1 ]
 then
  echo "found matching value"
  break
 fi
done

if [ $i -eq 10 ]
then
  echo "match not found"
fi

Save and close the file. You can run it with the following commands. We pass command line argument 3 to make it break out of loop when i=3.

$ sudo chmod +x break.sh
$ ./break.sh 3

Exit While Loop

Here is the above example using while loop and break statement. In the following statement, the while loop breaks if the variable i‘s value is equal to the one received using command line argument $1. Otherwise it continues with the loop.

#!/bin/sh

i=1
while $i < 10:
do
 if [ $i -eq $1 ]
 then
  echo "found matching value"
  break
 fi
done

if [ $i -eq 10 ]
then
  echo "match not found"
fi

Save and close the file. You can run it with the following commands. We pass command line argument 3 to make it break out of loop when i=4.

$ sudo chmod +x break.sh
$ ./break.sh 4

Using Nested Loops

Please note, when you use break statement alone, then it will exit only the immediate loop. If you are working with nested loops and want to exist all loops at once, you need to use ‘break N’ statement where N is the level of nesting.

For example, if you have one loop nested inside another, and you want to exit both loops then use break 2 statement, as shown below. It simply breaks out of both the loops if value of i matches that of command line argument.

#!/bin/sh

i=1
for [ $1 < 10]
   do
      while true
      do
         [ $i -eq $1 ] && break 2
      done
done

Save and close the file. You can run it with the following commands.

$ sudo chmod +x break.sh
$ ./break.sh 5

That’s it. In this article, we have learnt how to exit for loop, while loop and even nested loops in Linux.

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