tag 79901 notabug
close 79901
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details below...
On 27/11/2025 12:33, Carlos Maiolino via GNU coreutils Bug Reports wrote:
Hello,
I'm not sure if the behavior below is expected or perhaps a bug?
I'm using GNU coreutils 9.6
According to the TEST(1) manpage:
-n STRING
the length of STRING is nonzero
STRING equivalent to -n STRING
However, the small script below will produce inconsistent results, where
only the first if conditional will evaluate to True:
#!/bin/bash
B=" "
if [ -n $B ]; then
echo "passed 1"
fi
if [ $B ]; then
echo "passed 2"
fi
However it seems to me the variable expansion plays a role here, I'm not
sure if the variable expansion was supposed to differ between "$B" and
"-n $B" too, so perhaps it's a bash thing not a "test" thing?
You need to quote the variable expansion to maintain spaces,
otherwise `test -n $B` is equivalent to `test '-n'` which is true.
You want: [ -n "$B" ] && [ "$B" ] && echo both passed
cheers,
Padraig.
