Question about 'test' (Was Re: testing if a file is present)

Rob Lemley rob at b15.INGR.COM
Thu Nov 29 07:35:24 AEST 1990


In <14048 at ulysses.att.com> ekrell at ulysses.att.com (Eduardo Krell) writes:

>Why should the shell do anything about it? The "]" is an argument to
>"[" (which is a link to test). The shell just passes that token as an
>argument when it exec's test.

Also, the test command looks at argv[0] to see if it was called "test"
or "[".  If "[" then test verifies that the closing "]" argument is there.
If the closing "]" is not there, test exits with a status of 1 (false).

Rob



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