Originally Posted by Don Cragun

It isn't obvious to me that this shouldn't be treated as homework and be required to have been posted in the Homework & Coursework Questions forum and adhere to the special rules associated with that forum. I'll leave that determination to the moderators, but I'll treat my responses as if it had been posted there.

I had never seen an if statement coded this way, but after looking at the grammar for the shell, it is a valid format. More common ways of coding if statements would be:

Code:

if [[ condition ]]
then
    true branch code
else
    false branch code
fi

or

Code:

if [[ condition ]]; then
    true branch code
else
    false branch code
fi

Although indentation is not required by the shell (and it may seem unimportant for a trivial case like this script), when the code in the true and false sections becomes more complex, indentation will make your code much easier to read. I strongly suggest that you get into the habit of always using a consistent indentation style and stick with it no matter how trivial the script is.

Other than using 2 and 4 as operands to your script, what values have you used to convince yourself that this script is working correctly? When you issue the commands:

Code:

min 8 10
    and
min 10 2

do you get what you expected?

Do you intend for your script to compare numeric values or alphanumeric string values?