Shell test conditions and exit codes

Tutorials – Shell Scripting

Article from Issue 222/2019
Author(s):

The Bash shell uses different criteria to make decisions. Learn how to teach your shell scripts to make the right choice.

In the previous installment of this series [1], I  described how to add different possible courses of action to a script, so that the script can choose by itself which action to execute while running. In this issue, I will explain how to teach a script to choose which of the available actions to execute.

Often, the real decision-making challenge lies not in figuring out whether your shell script needs a while loop or some nested if statements but rather in determining the conditions that will tell your script when it should stop that loop or which branch of that "if" statement to execute. The main Bash tools for this purpose are a big set of test operators (see the descriptions online [2] [3] [4]) and their corresponding syntax, which can evaluate whether some condition is true or false. By contrast, exit status codes [5] are the traces that built-in commands, or whole scripts, leave behind to communicate their achievements.

In this article you will learn through examples and working code:

[...]

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