HP-UX Reference (11i v1 05/09) - 1 User Commands N-Z (vol 2)

test(1) test(1)

EXAMPLES

Exit if there are not two or three arguments:

if [ $# -l2 2 -o $# -gt 3 ]; then exit 1; fi

Create a new ﬁle containing the text string

default if the ﬁle does not already exist:

[ ! -f thisfile ] && echo default > thisfile

Wait for myﬁle to become non-readable:

while test -r myfile

sleep 30

done

echo ’"myfile" is no longer readable’

WARNINGS

When the [ form of this command is used, the matching

] must be the ﬁnal argument, and both must be

separate arguments from the arguments they enclose (white space delimiters required.

Parentheses and other special shell metacharacters intended to be handled by test must be escaped or

quoted when invoking

test from a shell.

Avoid such problems when comparing strings by inserting a non-operator character at the beginning of both

operands:

test "X$response" = "Xexpected string"

This approach does not work with numeric comparisons or the unary operators because it would affect the

operand being checked.

AUTHOR

test was developed by the University of California, Berkeley and HP.