Thelast command is like thebreak statement in C (as used in loops); it immediately exits the loop in question. If the LABEL is omitted, the command refers to the innermost enclosing loop. Thelast EXPR form, available starting in Perl 5.18.0, allows a label name to be computed at run time, and is otherwise identical tolast LABEL. Thecontinue block, if any, is not executed:
LINE: while (<STDIN>) { last LINE if /^$/; # exit when done with header #...}last cannot be used to exit a block that returns a value such aseval {},sub {}, ordo {}, and should not be used to exit a grep() or map() operation.
Note that a block by itself is semantically identical to a loop that executes once. Thuslast can be used to effect an early exit out of such a block.
See also"continue" for an illustration of howlast,next, andredo work.
Unlike most named operators, this has the same precedence as assignment. It is also exempt from the looks-like-a-function rule, solast ("foo")."bar" will cause "bar" to be part of the argument tolast.
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