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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Programming Newbie Chick Post 102515 by dsbeerf on Saturday 18th of March 2006 08:10:34 PM
Old 03-18-2006
I noticed you said you are a programming "newbie" in UNIX. So I think I need to say the following.

The '[' used to be the same as the program "test". It is now a shell builtin, with basically the same function. The '[' character is also recognized by the shells (sh|ksh|bash) as a 'special character', and as such, requires you to 'finish' the syntax with the ']' character. The way to do this is to have the ']' stand-alone, separate (by whitespace) from other characters (or with a 'defined' termination character, like --> '];' ).
THAT is why you got the error you were getting. The shell could not find a terminating ']' character.
The '[' is "test", but also an "open bracket". It needed to find a "close bracket" to complete the syntax.

B.T.W.: the tests for 'y', 'Y', 'yes', 'Yes', or 'YES' could more easily be accomplished with a 'case' statement. Easier to understand, and easier to adjust in the future, too.
 

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WILDMAT(3)						     Library Functions Manual							WILDMAT(3)

NAME
wildmat - perform shell-style wildcard matching SYNOPSIS
int wildmat(text, pattern) char *text; char *pattern; DESCRIPTION
Wildmat is part of libinn (3). Wildmat compares the text against the pattern and returns non-zero if the pattern matches the text. The pattern is interpreted according to rules similar to shell filename wildcards, and not as a full regular expression such as those handled by the grep(1) family of programs or the regex(3) or regexp(3) set of routines. The pattern is interpreted as follows: x Turns off the special meaning of x and matches it directly; this is used mostly before a question mark or asterisk, and is not spe- cial inside square brackets. ? Matches any single character. * Matches any sequence of zero or more characters. [x...y] Matches any single character specified by the set x...y. A minus sign may be used to indicate a range of characters. That is, [0-5abc] is a shorthand for [012345abc]. More than one range may appear inside a character set; [0-9a-zA-Z._] matches almost all of the legal characters for a host name. The close bracket, ], may be used if it is the first character in the set. The minus sign, -, may be used if it is either the first or last character in the set. [^x...y] This matches any character not in the set x...y, which is interpreted as described above. For example, [^]-] matches any character other than a close bracket or minus sign. HISTORY
Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> in 1986, and posted to Usenet several times since then, most notably in comp.sources.misc in March, 1991. Lars Mathiesen <thorinn@diku.dk> enhanced the multi-asterisk failure mode in early 1991. Rich and Lars increased the efficiency of star patterns and reposted it to comp.sources.misc in April, 1991. Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au> added minus sign and close bracket handling in June, 1991. This is revision 1.10, dated 1992/04/03. SEE ALSO
grep(1), regex(3), regexp(3). WILDMAT(3)
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