[bash] How to make "if not true condition"?

I would like to have the echo command executed when cat /etc/passwd | grep "sysa" is not true.

What am I doing wrong?

if ! [ $(cat /etc/passwd | grep "sysa") ]; then
        echo "ERROR - The user sysa could not be looked up"
        exit 2
fi

On Unix systems that supports it (not macOS it seems):

if getent passwd "$username" >/dev/null; then
    printf 'User %s exists\n' "$username"
else
    printf 'User %s does not exist\n' "$username"
fi 

This has the advantage that it will query any directory service that may be in use (YP/NIS or LDAP etc.) and the local password database file.

The issue with grep -q "$username" /etc/passwd is that it will give a false positive when there is no such user, but something else matches the pattern. This could happen if there is a partial or exact match somewhere else in the file.

For example, in my passwd file, there is a line saying

build:*:21:21:base and xenocara build:/var/empty:/bin/ksh

This would provoke a valid match on things like cara and enoc etc., even though there are no such users on my system.

For a grep solution to be correct, you will need to properly parse the /etc/passwd file:

if cut -d ':' -f 1 /etc/passwd | grep -qxF "$username"; then
    # found
else
    # not found
fi

... or any other similar test against the first of the :-delimited fields.

What am I doing wrong?

$(...) holds the value, not the exit status, that is why this approach is wrong. However, in this specific case, it does indeed work because sysa will be printed which makes the test statement come true. However, if ! [ $(true) ]; then echo false; fi would always print false because the true command does not write anything to stdout (even though the exit code is 0). That is why it needs to be rephrased to if ! grep ...; then.

An alternative would be cat /etc/passwd | grep "sysa" || echo error. Edit: As Alex pointed out, cat is useless here: grep "sysa" /etc/passwd || echo error.

Found the other answers rather confusing, hope this helps someone.

I think it can be simplified into:

grep sysa /etc/passwd || {
    echo "ERROR - The user sysa could not be looked up"
    exit 2
}

or in a single command line

$ grep sysa /etc/passwd || { echo "ERROR - The user sysa could not be looked up"; exit 2; }

Here is an answer by way of example:

In order to make sure data loggers are online a cron script runs every 15 minutes that looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
#
if ! ping -c 1 SOLAR &>/dev/null
then
  echo "SUBJECT:  SOLAR is not responding to ping" | ssmtp [email protected]
  echo "SOLAR is not responding to ping" | ssmtp [email protected]
else
  echo "SOLAR is up"
fi
#
if ! ping -c 1 OUTSIDE &>/dev/null
then
  echo "SUBJECT:  OUTSIDE is not responding to ping" | ssmtp [email protected]
  echo "OUTSIDE is not responding to ping" | ssmtp [email protected]
else
  echo "OUTSIDE is up"
fi
#

...and so on for each data logger that you can see in the montage at http://www.SDsolarBlog.com/montage

FYI, using &>/dev/null redirects all output from the command, including errors, to /dev/null

(The conditional only requires the exit status of the ping command)

Also FYI, note that since cron jobs run as root there is no need to use sudo ping in a cron script.

This one

if [[ !  $(cat /etc/passwd | grep "sysa") ]]
Then echo " something"
exit 2
fi