Comments on: Bourne/bash shell scripts: string comparison

By: Ben D.,

Ben D., — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 22:56:18 +0000

A number of commenters have hinted at this but no one has expressed it with perfect clarity, so I’ll give it a whirl:

“==” is not a valid operator in Bourne Shell.

The string comparison operator is “=”.

Thank you, that is all.

By: Daman Sternpak

Daman Sternpak — Fri, 06 May 2011 17:53:00 +0000

I had the same exact problem and it drove me nutty batshiat-insane. The problem: you need a space before and after the = sign.

By: Man1

Man1 — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:48:00 +0000

== never works. bloody are you kidding by posting wrong things over here?

By: Bermic2003

Bermic2003 — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 14:50:00 +0000

I do this by escaping less and greater sign, and it seems to work fine :

$> [ "a" > "b" ]
$> echo $?
1
$> [ "c" > "b" ]
$> echo $?
0

By: Tolya_kashuba

Tolya_kashuba — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 03:46:00 +0000

How can I compare two strings on less or greater? signs > and

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:27:00 +0000

Thanks for the comments. Somehow this article fell off our radar and I didn’t realize we had an issue with it. I really appreciate Martin for dropping me the email about the issue. The original tutorial has been updated.

By: Smudge

Smudge — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 19:46:00 +0000

Wow, have you geeks ever thought about getting along?

By: Achu

Achu — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:57:00 +0000

both the commands are not working, it throwing an error
./hello: [one=one]: not found

( var value ‘one’)

By: Kousalya

Kousalya — Mon, 17 May 2010 09:51:00 +0000

you can compare two string variables using
if [ $var1 == $var2 ]
if [ $var1 = $var2 ]

By: Kousalya

Kousalya — Mon, 17 May 2010 09:42:00 +0000

you can compare two string variables using
if [ $var1 == $var2 ]