Shell – What does “if !” mean

shell

I came across a if/then statement like this:

if ! foo ; then
        echo "blah" 
        exit 1
fi

What specifically does if ! mean? "If the result of foo is not true?" "If the exit code of foo is not 0"?

Best Answer

! inverts the meaning of the exit status of the command -- it's part of POSIX shell syntax, it's not part of if. From the POSIX spec:

If the reserved word ! does not precede the pipeline, the exit status shall be the exit status of the last command specified in the pipeline. Otherwise, the exit status shall be the logical NOT of the exit status of the last command. That is, if the last command returns zero, the exit status shall be 1; if the last command returns greater than zero, the exit status shall be zero.

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Shell – What Does Backquote/Backtick Mean in Commands?

This is a backtick. A backtick is not a quotation sign. It has a very special meaning. Everything you type between backticks is evaluated (executed) by the shell before the main command (like chown in your examples), and the output of that execution is used by that command, just as if you'd type that output at that place in the command line.

So, what

sudo chown `id -u` /somedir

effectively runs (depending on your user ID) is:

sudo chown 1000 /somedir
  \    \     \     \
   \    \     \     `-- the second argument to "chown" (target directory)
    \    \     `-- your user ID, which is the output of "id -u" command
     \    `-- "chown" command (change ownership of file/directory)
      `-- the "run as root" command; everything after this is run with root privileges

Have a look at this question to learn why, in many situations, it is not a good idea to use backticks.

Btw, if you ever wanted to use a backtick literally, e.g. in a string, you can escape it by placing a backslash (\) before it.

Bash Shell – What Does ‘rm is hashed’ Mean?

It's a performance thing; instead of searching the whole path for the binary every time it is called, it's put into a hash table for quicker lookup. So any binary that's already in this hash table, is hashed. If you move binaries around when they're already hashed, it will still try to call them in their old location.

See also help hash, or man bash and search for hash under builtin commands there.

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