hi guys

im a newbie to shell scripting and would appreciate any help possible. my questions will be very straight forward and relatively trivial to most of you.

as the thread title is asking, what are the operators??

i know there's the != and =, but for bourne and c shell, what are the lexical comparison operators?

i read from a website that you could use the < and > as long as you put the forward slash in front of them so that the shell interpreter can identify it as a string operator as opposed to a redirect operator.

this is a snippet of code i've been trying the > and < operators but the tcshell wont work with it. i'musing tcshell while i want to know for bourne and c shell because that's the only shell i have access to at the moment.

anyways here's the code

######################################
set VAR1="hi"
set VAR2="bye"

if [ $VAR1 \< $VAR2 ] ; then
echo "$VAR1 is lexically less than $VAR2"
else
echo "$VAR1 is lexically greater than $VAR2"
fi
exit 0

######################################

basically the shell can't interpret the \< part. any help appreciated.

thanks in advance