escape from a linux cli for loop

Question

I'm doing something like this:

for f in `find -iname '*.html'`; do scp $f remoteserver:$f; done;

I've got through about 3 of the 1000 files and I've decided I want to abort the operation.

CTRL+C only escapes the SCP login prompt and takes me to the next one, rather than escaping the for loop.

Is there a better way than hitting CTRL+C 9997 times?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hmm.. hitting CTRL+C twice in very quick succession seems to do the trick...

Answer 2

Use the bash 'trap' builtin that traps signals. This way you can trap your Ctrl-C and do ... exit :)

my2c

Answer 3

Simultaneously press ctrl+z to suspend the task then use kill %1 to kill that task.

You may find that xargs is a better way of achieving this task. Or rsync. Or even compressing the HTML files into an archive and scp-ing that. But this is probably off-topic for StackOverflow.

Answer 4

You should learn to check exit status of processes you run - especially if you run them in a loop:

for f in `find -iname '*.html'`; do scp $f remoteserver:$f || break; done;

Notice the || break bit.