Simple shell scripting question from a newbie.

[Lex Hider <alexeijh@pacific.net.au>]

Hi,

Been looking through the various shell scripts that make up Debian as a 
way to learn bash & perl scripting.
So please be nice if this is a really dumb question.

Is a piece of code like the following...

while [ x"$1" != x ]; do
	...
done

the same as using the -z flag for test.

It just looks like a weird way of doing things that occur frequently.

Please explain.

Lex.