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In the process of writing a shell script, I ran into an issue with the following if/else statement that falls somewhere in the middle of the script:
if [ $act -eq "add" ]
then
read - "add or update: " $comm
git commit -m "$comm $file"
else
git commit -m "$act $file"
fi
The returning error being:
./gitup: line 13: [: add: integer expression expected
and then proceeds with the rest of the script. How can I have the if segment evaluate/compare the variable to a string input rather than an integer; a different error was required when using "!=" among a couple of other things I tried.
Thanks. I had tried that, and the script would free, requiring a keystroke, but just found it was caused by an unrelated syntax error further down, so this worked perfectly. Thanks for the help. – tony_perkis666 – 2013-01-30T04:57:45.740
3@josephmarhee: Note that the
[[]]
test is a Bash specific construct, and this example works just as well with the POSIX[]
as used in the question. If the interpreter is explicitly given as#!/bin/bash
or similar, the[[]]
can be used without issues (and it is a bit faster than the alternative in Bash, I believe - not that it should be a bottle neck anyway), otherwise one should stick with[]
. If one doesn't need Bash specifics at all, the script will run a bit faster in e.g. Dash. And POSIX ensures inherent portability. – Daniel Andersson – 2013-01-30T09:28:50.437