Reminds me of my rather memorable introduction to special characters invoking functions, seeing this dastardly little quip in the email signature of someone in a mailing list (circa '95 or so).

    :(){:|:&};:

In college I took a database class, it was pretty basic overall as I had been playing with MySQL for a few years at that point. On the final exam I got a 90/100. The test was 10 questions that just had you write SQL to answer the question. I got all the queries 100% correct... except... I didn't put a ";" after each query. On a written test. I'm still a little bitter about that.

The ultimately sad part was the professor in a Sun OS machine.

In a corner with no where to go, giving demerits because his bash was older than he realized.

Reminds me of my college professor that claimed you don’t have to close HTML tags (some you absolutely do) and I proved that you do. Not all of them, but most of them. (Netscape Navigator Days)

I knew that `[` was notionally the same as `test`, but had never 'checked'. I just assumed `[` was a built-in that conformed rather than them actually being the same.

So I very much enjoyed following along with the article, first seeing that `ls -il /bin/test` and `ls -il /bin/[` are at different inodes, then md5summing and seeing they are different, getting concerned, then the article revealing that is the case now (I'm trusting rather than verifying about the separate builds).

I was then very satisfied to recall that `[[` is a built-in (as `[[` isn't portable between all shells).

Whoa!

/bin/[ as a binary looking for it's own "]" closing bracket!

What a nasty syntax hack!

I wonder what the motivation was for doing this rather than just implementing test expression support directly in the shell?

I just tried and bash also accepts some other odd filenames in place of "[", so you can do:

ln -s /bin/test "-"

ln -s /bin/test "$"

And use either of these in place of "[" (assuming they are on your path). Of course they still expect the closing "]" since that requirement comes from /bin/test.

It's an interesting way to extend bash in a confusing way! You could write a "$" utility that did something else entirely, perhaps looking for a "closing $" too, then write something like:

if $ args $;

then

fi

Here is the part of the test.c source from V7 Unix:

   main(argc, argv)
   char *argv[];
   {
   
    ac = argc; av = argv; ap = 1;
    if(EQ(argv[0],"[")) {
     if(!EQ(argv[--ac],"]"))
      synbad("] missing","");
    }
    argv[ac] = 0;
    if (ac<=1) exit(1);
    exit(exp()?0:1);
   }

Another good place to use "test" is if you are not in a control statement and you are just setting $?.

Edit: EQ() is defined as:

   #define EQ(a,b) ((tmp=a)==0?0:(strcmp(tmp,b)==0))
   char *tmp;

The [[…]] built-in test version was introduced in Peter Korn's korn shell, ksh88 IIRC. As where various other modernized notations like array variables, process substitution or

    $(command)

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E36870/ksh88-1.htm...

While learning the Bourne shell as acstudent, I was rapidly lured by csh and then tcsh, but Tom Christiansen's pamphlet https://everything2.com/title/csh+programming+considered+har...

and (or?) the appearance of Paul Falstad's Z-Shell saved me ;-0

So if you really want to troll someone, you can put them in quotes.

  if "[" "$foo" "==" "bar" "]"; then ...

https://github.com/anordal/shellharden/blob/master/how_to_do...

> When I was a young, green, university student, I was forced to use test(1) as the only true way to do testing in shell scripting. […] Yeah, I was also forced to not use semicolons as they were evil (according to my professor, any comment unneeded!).

The author’s professor clearly went overboard, but doesn’t this entire anecdote demonstrate the value of teaching it this way? Having green students call the `test` binary provides more insight into how UNIX operates, and gets them using a UNIX mindset. They can discover the syntactic shortcuts later.

I've been spending too much time researching home improvement and thought this was going to be about deck-building.

The real solution is that as soon as you need square brackets, switch to a better language than bash

Nowadays [ is a builtin. The subprocess for a simple branch would be excessive overhead.

The Objective-C folks probably are chuckling their square brackets send messages.

To me the salient part is that he had an exam on shell scripts?!

Now do [ ... ] and [[ ... ]]

I'm still not sure when to use one or the other. I use double brackets by default until something doesn't work.

Here's Greg's Wiki about the difference between [, [[ and test

https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/031