Originally Posted by bakunin

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But because this didn't look like the programming languages the inventors of UNIX knew (they were all programmers, after all), they created a device which made it look more like what they were accustomed to: they created a symbolic link from /usr/bin/test to /usr/bin/[ - in fact "[" is a possible filename - and the line now looked like this:

Code:

if [ $? -eq 0 ; then

In some variants of UNIX (HP-Ux, if i remember right) this link still exists.

That was actually better but it looked like a bracket was opened and never closed. So the final change to /usr/bin/test was that it expected a "]" as the last argument if it was called as "[" - and this created the look we know today:

Code:

if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then

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I hope this helps.

bakunin