Bash Quick Start Guide

Using the if keyword

A shell script is fundamentally a sequence of commands. In such a script, we very often want to run a command only if a testable condition is true. In earlier chapters, we already saw one way to do this, with the && control operator:

$ grep -q bash /etc/shells && printf 'Bash is a system shell\n'

The preceding command line separates two commands with &&. The second command, which prints a string to standard output, only runs if the first command, grep -q bash /etc/shells, finds the bash string in the /etc/shells file and hence exits with status zero (success).

Using the if keyword, we can make this conditional approach more flexible, and somewhat easier to read:

$ if grep -q bash /etc/shells ; then printf 'Bash is a system ...