HowTo: Skip Bash For Loop

How do I skip bash for loop if certain condition is satisfied under UNIX / Linux / BSD / OS X?

You can do early exit with break statement inside the for loop. You can exit from within a FOR loop using break using the following syntax:

for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 10
do
  statements1      #Executed for all values of ''I'', up to a disaster-condition if any.
  statements2
  if (disaster-condition)
  then
	break       	       #Abandon the loop.
  fi
  statements3          # While good and, no disaster-condition.
done
 

Example

In this example, go through all conf file in /etc/ directory and break the loop if /etc/resolv.conf file, else loop will end when all files are checked and it will display not found message:

#!/bin/bash
found=0
for i in /tmp/*.conf
do
	if [ "$i" == "resolv.conf" ]
	then
		echo "resolv.conf found in /etc"
		found=1
		break
	fi
done
if [ $found -eq 0 ]
then
	echo "resolv.conf not found in /etc"
fi
 

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