The body of a user-defined function can contain a return statement. 
This statement returns control to the rest of the Octave program.  It
looks like this:
return
Unlike the return statement in C, Octave's return
statement cannot be used to return a value from a function.  Instead,
you must assign values to the list of return variables that are part of
the function statement.  The return statement simply makes
it easier to exit a function from a deeply nested loop or conditional
statement.
   
Here is an example of a function that checks to see if any elements of a vector are nonzero.
     function retval = any_nonzero (v)
       retval = 0;
       for i = 1:length (v)
         if (v (i) != 0)
           retval = 1;
           return;
         endif
       endfor
       printf ("no nonzero elements found\n");
     endfunction
   Note that this function could not have been written using the
break statement to exit the loop once a nonzero value is found
without adding extra logic to avoid printing the message if the vector
does contain a nonzero element.