continue in Mac OS X

By: Strauss K in macos Tutorials on 2011-02-03

continue is a built-in shell command in Mac OS X and other Unix-based operating systems. The continue command is used in a shell script or a loop (such as a for or while loop) to skip the rest of the commands in the loop and continue with the next iteration.

When the continue command is executed in a loop, the shell immediately stops executing the rest of the commands in the loop for the current iteration and proceeds to the next iteration of the loop.

Here's an example of how the continue command can be used in a for loop in a shell script:

#!/bin/bash

for i in {1..10}
do
    if [ $i -eq 5 ]
    then
        continue
    fi

    echo "Iteration $i"
done

In this script, a for loop is used to iterate through the numbers 1 to 10. However, when the value of the loop variable $i is equal to 5, the continue command is executed, which skips the rest of the commands in the loop for that iteration and proceeds to the next iteration. As a result, the script prints the following output:

Iteration 1
Iteration 2
Iteration 3
Iteration 4
Iteration 6
Iteration 7
Iteration 8
Iteration 9
Iteration 10

In this example, the command echo "Iteration $i" is skipped when the value of $i is equal to 5, but it is executed for all other values of $i. This demonstrates how the continue command can be used to skip certain iterations of a loop in a shell script.

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