Exit Block (break)

Terminate execution of a block within your processes scope

Description

break will terminate execution of a block (eg function, private, foreach, if, etc).

break requires a parameter and that parameter is the name of the caller block you wish to break out of. If it is a function or private, then it will be the name of that function or private. If it is an if or foreach loop, then it will be if or foreach (respectively).

Usage

break block-name

Examples

Exiting an iteration block

function foo {
    %[1..10] -> foreach i {
        out $i
        if { $i == 5 } then {
            out "exit running function"
            break foo
            out "ended"
        }
    }
}

Running the above code would output:

» foo
1
2
3
4
5
exit running function

Exiting a function

break can be considered to exhibit the behavior of return (from other languages) too

function example {
    if { $USER == "root" } then {
        err "Don't run this as root"
        break example
    }
    
    # ... do something ...
}

Though in this particular use case it is recommended that you use return instead, the above code does illustrate how break behaves.

Detail

break cannot escape the bounds of its scope (typically the function it is running inside). For example, in the following code we are calling break bar (which is a different function) inside of the function foo:

function foo {
    %[1..10] -> foreach i {
        out $i
        if { $i == 5 } then {
            out "exit running function"
            break bar
            out "ended"
        }
    }
}

function bar {
    foo
}

Regardless of whether we run foo or bar, both of those functions will raise the following error:

Error in `break` (7,17): no block found named `bar` within the scope of `foo`

See Also


This document was generated from builtins/core/structs/break_doc.yaml.

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Last built on Wed Jul 2 22:12:32 UTC 2025 against commit bb72b6fbb72b6fdd502f835172d7d06207ba4ec2c70886c.

Current version is 7.0.2107 (develop) which has been verified against tests cases.