for - perform a set of commands multiple times¶
Synopsis¶
for VARNAME in [VALUES...]; COMMANDS...; end
Description¶
for
is a loop construct. It will perform the commands specified by COMMANDS
multiple times. On each iteration, the local variable specified by VARNAME
is assigned a new value from VALUES
. If VALUES
is empty, COMMANDS
will not be executed at all. The VARNAME
is visible when the loop terminates and will contain the last value assigned to it. If VARNAME
does not already exist it will be set in the local scope. For our purposes if the for
block is inside a function there must be a local variable with the same name. If the for
block is not nested inside a function then global and universal variables of the same name will be used if they exist.
Example¶
for i in foo bar baz; echo $i; end
# would output:
foo
bar
baz
Notes¶
The VARNAME
was local to the for block in releases prior to 3.0.0. This means that if you did something like this:
for var in a b c
if break_from_loop
break
end
end
echo $var
The last value assigned to var
when the loop terminated would not be available outside the loop. What echo $var
would write depended on what it was set to before the loop was run. Likely nothing.