next LABEL next EXPR next The "next" command is like the "continue" statement in C; it starts the next iteration of the loop: LINE: while () { next LINE if /^#/; # discard comments #... } Note that if there were a "continue" block on the above, it would get executed even on discarded lines. If LABEL is omitted, the command refers to the innermost enclosing loop. The "next EXPR" form, available as of Perl 5.18.0, allows a label name to be computed at run time, being otherwise identical to "next LABEL". "next" cannot be used to exit a block which returns a value such as "eval {}", "sub {}", or "do {}", 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. Thus "next" will exit such a block early. See also "continue" for an illustration of how "last", "next", and "redo" work. Unlike most named operators, this has the same precedence as assignment. It is also exempt from the looks-like-a-function rule, so "next ("foo")."bar"" will cause "bar" to be part of the argument to "next".