Re: Simple shell scripting question from a newbie.
On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 05:28:27PM +1100, Lex Hider wrote:
> 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.
Don't take this as gospel, but I've seen it around a lot too, particularly
in older-school shell scripts. I'm guessing it was done before the -z test
existed or something...
Andrew
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