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

Question

I am rsyncing a few directories. I have a bash terminal open and am executing something like this:

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

However if I want to stop the whole things, I press Control-C. That stops the rsync, but then it keeps going to the next one. In this case I realize what has happened and then just press Control-C like a madman until things work again.

Is there some way to 'fix' this. I want it so if I have a loop like that, and press Control-C, that it will return me to my bash shell.

Answer 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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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/