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Monday, December 19, 2022

[FIXED] Why should there be spaces around '[' and ']' in Bash?

 December 19, 2022     bash, if-statement, syntax     No comments   

Issue

I was trying to write a Bash script that uses an if statement.

if[$CHOICE -eq 1];

The script was giving me errors until I gave a space before and after [ and before ] as shown below:

if [ $CHOICE -eq 1 ];

My question here is, why is the space around the square brackets so important in Bash?


Solution

Once you grasp that [ is a command, a whole lot becomes clearer!

[ is another way to spell "test".

help [

However while they do exactly the same, test turns out to have a more detailed help page. Check

help test

...for more information.


Furthermore note that I'm using, by intention, help test and not man test. That's because test and [ are shell builtin commands nowadays. Their feature set might differ from /bin/test and /bin/[ from coreutils which are the commands described in the man pages.



Answered By - johnsyweb
Answer Checked By - Mary Flores (PHPFixing Volunteer)
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