Re: -d option not working. . .?

[Michael Williams]

On Sep 12, 2007, at 2:56 AM, Bob Proulx wrote:
>  The [ is a shell builtin, not a shell
> metacharacter.  Shell metacharacters do not need to be separated by
> whitespace but the test program needs to be apart or it won't be
> parsed right.  That is why you are seeing "[-d" not found.  It is not
> a parenthesis as in some programming languages.  The [ is a synonym
> for the "test" operator.  It is a command like grep, sed, awk, etc.

Being that I'm not a bash (or any other shell for that matter) guru,  
is there any reason that parsing occurs this way?  Why is it not more  
like other programming languages?

>   [ -d /tmp ] && echo /tmp is a dir
>
> Do it this way.
>
>   if [ -d "$i" ]
>
> Note that you should quote the argument to protect against whitespace
> there.

Thanks, that worked perfectly!