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The break Statement

The break statement jumps out of the innermost for, while, or do loop that encloses it. The following example finds the smallest divisor of any integer, and also identifies prime numbers:

# find smallest divisor of num
{
   num = $1
   for (div = 2; div*div <= num; div++)
     if (num % div == 0)
       break
   if (num % div == 0)
     printf "Smallest divisor of %d is %d\n", num, div
   else
     printf "%d is prime\n", num
}

When the remainder is zero in the first if statement, awk immediately breaks out of the containing for loop. This means that awk proceeds immediately to the statement following the loop and continues processing. (This is very different from the exit statement, which stops the entire awk program. See The exit Statement.)

Th following program illustrates how the condition of a for or while statement could be replaced with a break inside an if:

# find smallest divisor of num
{
  num = $1
  for (div = 2; ; div++) {
    if (num % div == 0) {
      printf "Smallest divisor of %d is %d\n", num, div
      break
    }
    if (div*div > num) {
      printf "%d is prime\n", num
      break
    }
  }
}

The break statement has no meaning when used outside the body of a loop. However, although it was never documented, historical implementations of awk treated the break statement outside of a loop as if it were a next statement (see The next Statement). Recent versions of Unix awk no longer allow this usage. gawk supports this use of break only if --traditional has been specified on the command line (see Command-Line Options). Otherwise, it is treated as an error, since the POSIX standard specifies that break should only be used inside the body of a loop. (d.c.)