PePa wrote:
In that case, would not [[ =fx $file ]] be more workable and in line with common GNU short commandline option practice??
Do you mean '-fx' ? I assume you are meaning as an alternate? It would be fine with me, even better on an aesthetic sense, however, Bash already has multi-character ops starting with a dash. While "-ge $file" could probably be parsed reliably apart from "$file2 -ge $file", they look similar to a human and might create more confusion than help. (-ge $file == exists & groupid set), vs testing contents of integer vars $file2 and $file for integer-var $file2 being greater-than-or-equal to integer-var $file. Leveraging the curly brace format, implying [[ -{g,e} $file ]] would be similar to the quoted example I mentioned. I.e. -- it would be a matter of applying brace expansion even though quotes didn't exist. I.e. instead of: eval 'test -'{g,e}' /bin/ls && :' && echo executable file one could remove the eval, quotes and extra '&& :' at the end and use: test -{g,e} /bin/ls && echo executable file I _think_ people who are familiar w/brace expansion would easily understand this new form and not confuse it with existing features. Does that make sense? -l