Linux and Unix Shell Programming

17.2. Using logical operators with tests

Testing for a file’s status is OK, but in some instances you’ll want to compare one file’s status against another. The shell offers three types of logical operators for you to accomplish this:

-a	Logical AND, true, if both sides of the operator are true
-o	Logical OR, true, if either sides of the operator can be true
!	Logical NOT, true, if the condition is false

Let’s now compare using these files.

-rw-r--r--  1 root  root    0 May 15 11:29 scores.txt -rwxr-xr--  1 root  root    0 May 15 11:49 results.txt 

The following example tests whether both files are readable.

						$ [ -w results.txt -a -w scores.txt ] 
$ echo $?
0
					

It finds out that they are.

To test if either of the files is executable use the logical ...