40

In the process of writing a shell script, I ran into an issue with the following if/else statement that falls somewhere in the middle of the script:

if [ $act -eq "add" ]
then
    read - "add or update: " $comm
    git commit -m "$comm $file"
else
    git commit -m "$act $file"
fi

The returning error being:

./gitup: line 13: [: add: integer expression expected

and then proceeds with the rest of the script. How can I have the if segment evaluate/compare the variable to a string input rather than an integer; a different error was required when using "!=" among a couple of other things I tried.

tony_perkis666
  • 547

2 Answers2

64

Something like this:

act="add"
if [[ $act = "add" ]]
then
    echo good
else
    echo not good
fi

-eq is for number comparison, use = for string comparison

Guru
  • 1,231
11

This method would also work. Very similar to @Guru's answer but removes the need for double square brackets.

if [ "$act" == "add" ]
then
echo "Good!"
      else
      echo "Not good!"
fi
Yokai
  • 299