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

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.

The official definition of the test command is the POSIX standard (to which the bash implementation should conform reasonably well, perhaps with some extensions).

Examples related to bash

Comparing a variable with a string python not working when redirecting from bash script Zipping a file in bash fails How do I prevent Conda from activating the base environment by default? Get first line of a shell command's output Fixing a systemd service 203/EXEC failure (no such file or directory) /bin/sh: apt-get: not found VSCode Change Default Terminal Run bash command on jenkins pipeline How to check if the docker engine and a docker container are running? How to switch Python versions in Terminal?

Examples related to shell

Comparing a variable with a string python not working when redirecting from bash script Get first line of a shell command's output How to run shell script file using nodejs? Run bash command on jenkins pipeline Way to create multiline comments in Bash? How to do multiline shell script in Ansible How to check if a file exists in a shell script How to check if an environment variable exists and get its value? Curl to return http status code along with the response docker entrypoint running bash script gets "permission denied"

Examples related to syntax

What is the 'open' keyword in Swift? Check if returned value is not null and if so assign it, in one line, with one method call Inline for loop What does %>% function mean in R? R - " missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed " Printing variables in Python 3.4 How to replace multiple patterns at once with sed? What's the meaning of "=>" (an arrow formed from equals & greater than) in JavaScript? How can I fix MySQL error #1064? What do >> and << mean in Python?