What does -ne mean in bash

Question

What does the command  -ne  mean in a bash script    For instance  what does the following line from a bash script do      RESULT -ne 0

User · Answer

not equal  So in this case   RESULT is tested to not be equal to zero   However  the test is done numerically  not alphabetically   n1 -ne n2     True if the integers n1 and n2 are not algebraically equal    compared to   s1    s2      True if the strings s1 and s2 are not identical

User · Answer

This is one of those things that can be difficult to search for if you don t already know where to look     is actually a command  not part of the bash shell syntax as you might expect  It happens to be a Bash built-in command  so it s documented in the Bash manual   There s also an external command that does the same thing  on many systems  it s provided by the GNU Coreutils package     is equivalent to the test command  except that   requires   as its last argument  and test does not   Assuming the bash documentation is installed on your system  if you type info bash and search for  test  or      the apostrophes are part of the search   you ll find the documentation for the   command  also known as the test command  If you use man bash instead of info bash  search for    test  the word test at the beginning of a line  following some number of spaces    Following the reference to  Bash Conditional Expressions  will lead you to the description of -ne  which is the numeric inequality operator   ne  stands for  not equal   By contrast     is the string inequality operator   You can also find bash documentation on the web    Bash reference Bourne shell builtins  including test and    Bash Conditional Expressions --  Scroll to the bottom  -ne is under  arg1 OP arg2   POSIX documentation for test   The official definition of the test command is the POSIX standard  to which the bash implementation should conform reasonably well  perhaps with some extensions

[bash] What does "-ne" mean in bash?

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