So far, we have relied on the conditional logic of loops to exit the iterations. Sometimes we want to exit the loop early or skip an iteration. This is what the break and continue commands are for.

break will exit the loop it is executed in:

for ($i = 0; $i -lt 5; $i++) {
  if ($i -eq 2) {
    break
  }
  Write-Host $i
}

The above for loop is defined to loop 5 times: $i starts at 0, and each loop will fire from $i equals 0 through 4. Inside the loop body is an if statement that checks if $i is 2, and if so, break. The following output shows that the loop exits once $i equals 2.

0
1

continue will skip a loop iteration:

for ($i = 0; $i -lt 5; $i++) {
  if ($i -eq 2) {
    continue
  }
  Write-Host $i
}

Using the first example but replacing break with continue causes the loop to finish through the condition, $i -lt 5, but skip the iteration when $i equals 2. The output shows this:

0
1
3
4

As we can see, the for loop finishes its iterations but does not output 2.

break and continue are helpful when there are exceptional cases that need to be considered when looping. Your loop condition may cover some or most situations for your code execution, but break and continue can add extra behavior if necessary.