bash null conditional

Robert Nichols rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net
Tue Mar 31 04:45:32 UTC 2009


Craig White wrote:
> I'm not doing classwork...a little too old for that I think.
> 
> I sort of did need the 'if' because I took the line out of a context
> from a bigger shell script that does more than this and reduced it down
> to the simplest form first for my trial and error and then for the list.
> 
> Thanks though...I sort of had those in mind when I started but the
> context gets deeper - thus the 
>   if [ grep -c some_expression file -eq 0 ]; then ...
> did the job nicely.

Heck, if you want to simplify even further, don't bother with the '['
command and just use the return code from 'grep':

     if grep -q some_expression file; then
         echo "grep found something"
     fi

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.




More information about the users mailing list