Bash Loop - How to stop the loop when I press Control-C inside a command?

Solution 1:

for DIR in * ; do rsync -a $DIR example.com:somewhere/ || break; done

This will also exit the loop if an individual rsync run fails for some reason.

Solution 2:

To expand on Dennis' answer, your code might look like:

trap "echo Exited!; exit;" SIGINT SIGTERM

For a working example (that happens to involve rsync), check out http://gist.github.com/279849.

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Solution 3:

You can set a trap for Control-C.

trap <command> SIGINT

will execute the command when Control-C is pressed. Just put the trap statement somewhere in your script at a point where you want it to become effective.

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Solution 4:

1. Press Ctrl-Z to suspend the script ;
2. kill %%

Credits, explanations and more details in this answer.

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Solution 5:

When you put a string of commands inside parentheses, the string will act as a single process, and will receive the SIGINT and terminate when you hit Ctrl-C:

(for DIR in * ; do rsync -a $DIR example.com:somewhere/ ; done)

But! In the case of the rsync command, it allows multiple sources, so the code you wrote would be better-written as:

rsync -a * example.com:somewhere/