Can not test many arguments Post: 90097

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Can not test many arguments Post 90097 by vino on Friday 18th of November 2005 07:12:55 AM

11-18-2005

Registered User

You might want to check the man pages. See the following in bold.
From man ksh

Code:

       [[ expression ]]
              Similar to the test and [ ... ] commands (described later), with
              the following exceptions:
                �    Field splitting and file name  generation  are  not  per-
                     formed on arguments.
                �    The  -a  (and) and -o (or) operators are replaced with &&
                     and ||, respectively.
                �    Operators (e.g., -f, =, !, etc.) must be unquoted.
                �    The second operand of != and = expressions  are  patterns
                     (e.g., the comparison in
                                        [[ foobar = f*r ]]
                     succeeds).
                �    There  are two additional binary operators: < and > which
                     return true if their first string operand is  less  than,
                     or  greater  than,  their  second string operand, respec-
                     tively.
                �    The single argument form of  test,  which  tests  if  the
                     argument  has  non-zero  length,  is not valid - explicit
                     operators must be always be used, e.g., instead of
                                              [ str ]
                     use
                                           [[ -n str ]]
                �    Parameter, command and arithmetic substitutions are  per-
                     formed  as  expressions are evaluated and lazy expression
                     evaluation is used for the &&  and  ||  operators.   This
                     means that in the statement
                                  [[ -r foo && $(< foo) = b*r ]]
                     the  $(<  foo)  is  evaluated if and only if the file foo
                     exists and is readable.

vino

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test

test(1) General Commands Manual test(1)

Name
test - test conditional expression

Syntax
test expr
[ expr ]

Description
The command evaluates the expression expr. If the value of expr is true, the command returns a zero exit status; otherwise, it returns a
nonzero exit status. The command also returns a nonzero exit status if no arguments are specified.

Options
The following primitives are used to construct expr:

-r file Tests if the file exists and is readable.

-w file Tests if the file exists and is writable.

-f file Tests if the file exists and is not a directory.

-d file Tests if the file exists and is a directory.

-s file Tests if the file exists and has a size greater than zero.

-t [ fildes ] Tests if the open file, whose file descriptor number is fildes (1 by default), is associated with a terminal device.

-z s1 Tests if the length of string s1 is zero.

-n s1 Tests if the length of the string s1 is nonzero.

s1 = s2 Tests if the strings s1 and s2 are equal.

s1 != s2 Tests if the strings s1 and s2 are not equal.

s1 Tests if s1 is not the null string.

n1 -eq n2 Tests if number1 equals number2.

n1 -ge n2 Tests if number1 is greater than or equal to number2.

n1 -gt n2 Tests if number1 is greater than number2.

n1 -le n2 Tests if number1 is less than or equal to number2.

n1 -lt n2 Tests if number1 is less than number2.

n1 -ne n2 Tests if number1 is not equal to number2.

These primitives can be combined with the following operators:

!expr Negates evaluation of expression.

expr -a expr Tests logical and of two expressions.

expr -o expr Tests logical or of two expressions.

( expr... ) Groups expressions.

The -a operator takes precedence over the -o operator. Note that all the operators and flags are separate arguments to Note also that
parentheses are meaningful to the Shell and must be escaped.