On Mon, 2010-01-25 at 16:44 +0100, Andreas Schwab wrote:
Garrett Holmstrom gholms@fedoraproject.org writes:
On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 6:09 AM, Bryn M. Reeves bmr@redhat.com wrote:
It's cute isn't it? I had the biggest grin the day I realised that '[' was just another command..
That's the reason [[ can use special characters like < and > without escaping, while [ can't: [[ is a builtin, but [ isn't.
Well, [ is a builtin too, but [[ is a keyword recognised by the parser, thus it can use special parsing rules.
<nitpick> [ may be a built in but then again (as its presence in /usr/bin implies) it may not be :). In traditional shells it was a proper command but is often a builtin these days.
[[..]] are one of the syntactic elements the bash provides for building compound commands.
Regards, Bryn.