Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
Is there any limitation on the no of characters to be compared using the if statement in Unix. We had an issue while comparing the following two nos.
var1=20051031222900 & var2=20051101003545. The last six dgits are the time stamp for a day.
The if statement is like this:
if [ $var2 -gt $var1 ]
then
move files to a diff directory
else
dont move
fi

The script was coming to the else path for the above mentioned comparisons.
We changed the variable to :
var1=051031222900 and var2=051101003545. After this change, the if statement worked fine. Could anyone please throw some light on this.
Our unix box is HP-UX 11.11.

Thanks,
Ranjith

Guys,
I searched through the site and got the solution. It could be done through string comparisons.
if [[ $var2 > $var1 ]]
then
--
else
--
fi
Thanks a lot guys.

Ranjith

Hi all,
Can some one throw some light on how "if" compares nos. Just needed to follow up on the above mentioned issue and why it failed.
Thanks in advance,
Ranjith

ksh converts the strings to integers. Then it does an arithmetic compare on the integers. With HP-UX 11.11, ksh is using 32 bit integers.

Thanks Perderabo. Found out the issue. Looks like the size of the variable was higher than that could be stored and it overflowed. Is it better doing string comparisons in such cases so that such a one-off issue doesn't arise.

String compare on numbers is dangerous...

Code:

$ [ 9 > 11 ] && echo yikes!
yikes!
$

You are getting away with it because your strings have the same length.

What happens if the strings to be compared are of the same length in the application all the time. Then is it advisable. There is going to be no change in the length of both the strings.