[SOLVED] "unary operator expected" error in Bash if condition

Issue

This script is getting an error:

elif [ $operation = "man" ]; then
    if [ $aug1 = "add" ]; then         # <- Line 75
    echo "Man Page for: add"
    echo ""
    echo "Syntax: add [number 1] [number 2]"
    echo ""
    echo "Description:"
    echo "Add two different numbers together."
    echo ""
    echo "Info:"
    echo "Added in v1.0"
    echo ""
elif [ -z $aug1 ]; then
    echo "Please specify a command to read the man page."
else
    echo "There is no manual page for that command."
fi

I get this error:

calc_1.2: line 75: [: =: unary operator expected

Solution

If you know you're always going to use Bash, it's much easier to always use the double bracket conditional compound command [[ ... ]], instead of the POSIX-compatible single bracket version [ ... ]. Inside a [[ ... ]] compound, word-splitting and pathname expansion are not applied to words, so you can rely on

if [[ $aug1 == "and" ]];

to compare the value of $aug1 with the string and.

If you use [ ... ], you always need to remember to double quote variables like this:

if [ "$aug1" = "and" ];

If you don't quote the variable expansion and the variable is undefined or empty, it vanishes from the scene of the crime, leaving only

if [ = "and" ];

which is not a valid syntax. (It would also fail with a different error message if $aug1 included white space or shell metacharacters.)

The modern [[ operator has lots of other nice features, including regular expression matching.

Answered By - rici