Forcibly break a for loop in sh

Question

If I run a for loop on the command line in sh, and I press control-C, it usually cancels the current running process, so I need to hold ^C until the shell itself catches it and breaks the loop. Is there a way to break current process and the loop immediately?

Answer 1

Easiest way I know would be to suspend the foreground job (^z), then kill it using the job id (kill %JOB_ID)

Example:

[me@host]$ while [ : ]; do less /etc/motd; done # Ctrl-C can't kill this

After a Ctrl-z

[1]+  Stopped                 less /etc/motd

[me@host]$ kill %1
[me@host]$

The number within the brackets ( [1] ) at the beginning of the suspension message gives you the job id.

You can also list out ids of suspended jobs using the the "jobs" command.