Leaving a loop early

Sometimes when you are coding a script, you encounter a situation where you would like to exit the loop early, before the ending condition is met. This can be accomplished using the break and continue commands.

Here is a script that shows these commands. I am also introducing the sleep command which will be talked about in detail in the next script.

Chapter 3 - Script 9

#!/bin/sh
#
# 5/3/2017
#
echo "script9 - Linux Scripting Book"

FN1=/tmp/break.txt
FN2=/tmp/continue.txt

x=1
while [ $x -le 1000000 ]
do
 echo "x:$x"
 if [ -f $FN1 ] ; then
  echo "Running the break command"
  rm -f $FN1
  break
 fi

 if [ -f $FN2 ] ; then
  echo "Running the continue command"
  rm -f $FN2
  continue
 fi

 let x++
 sleep 1
done

echo "x:$x"

echo "End of script9"

exit 0

Here's the output from my system:

Run this on your system, and in another terminal cd to the /tmp directory. Run the command touch continue.txt and watch what happens. If you like you can do this multiple times (remember...