PowerShell Return and Continue - Explained

PowerShell return, continue and exit statements

In the previous post PowerShell break statement - Explained we have seen how we can use the break statement to interrupt script execution, we also briefly mentioned other statements like continue, return and exit which we are going to cover in this article.

Continue statement

Similarly to break the continue statement is used to alter flow of a loop but instead of forcing flow to immediately quit it will cause next element to be processed.

To illustrate this I will use the same example we used in the previous article for reference only here’s the code

# Count from 0 to 100 but exit as soon you
# Counter reaches 10
$myNumber = 0

while ($myNumber -lt 100)
{
    Write-Host "This is inside the loop value is $myNumber"

    # Increment
    $myNumber++

    if ($myNumber -eq 10)
    {
        Write-Host "Value is $myNumber - Exiting now!"

        break
    }

    Write-Host "Value is $myNumber"
}

Write-Host 'This is outside the loop'

The above code will count from 0 to 100 printing each number in the sequence but we forced it to quit at 10 via the break statement.

Here’s a slightly different example with the continue statement:

# Count from 0 to 10 but exit as soon you
# Counter reaches 10
$myNumber = 0

while ($myNumber -lt 10)
{
    # Increment
    $myNumber++

    if ($myNumber -eq 5)
    {
        Write-Host "I will not print this number!"

        continue
    }

    Write-Host "Value is $myNumber"
}

Write-Host 'This is outside the loop'

The above code will produce the following output

Value is 1 Value is 2 Value is 3 Value is 4 I will not print this number! Value is 6 Value is 7 Value is 8 Value is 9 Value is 10

As you can see we altered loop flow, number 5 is not printed, without completely interrupting its execution, we simply skipped an element which is very useful in situations like exception handling.

Return Statement

The return statement allows us to exit the current scope be it a function, script or script block.

Oversimplifying the concept return has a similar effect as the break statement but it allows us to return an object as part of the process.

Let’s see an example of this with the same code we just used

# Count from 0 to 10 but exit as soon you
# Counter reaches 10
$myNumber = 0

while ($myNumber -lt 10)
{
    # Increment
    $myNumber++

    if ($myNumber -eq 5)
    {
        return $myNumber
    }

    Write-Host "Value is $myNumber"
}

The above code will produce the following output

Value is 1 Value is 2 Value is 3 Value is 4 5

Number 5 is returned as output and not simply printed on screen like other numbers yet the loop will not continue its execution.

This is the basis of working with functions which is something I will better describe in a new post.

Closing Notes

This article concludes our introduction to PowerShell statements and how they can be used to alter flow in our scripts.

In a subsequent post series I will describe Functions where the return statement will be the foundation of our coding.