1
What was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]?
In shell scripting you sometimes come across comparisons where each value is prefixed with "x". Here are some examples from GitHub:
Vidar Holen
- Popular posts
- 10
- Total points
- 3,079
- HN comments
- 1,932
- Rank
- #459 personal
Visit vidarholen.net → On Hacker News Apr 2017 – Jul 2025
Software Engineering 10Tools & Productivity 4Systems & Performance 2Programming Languages 2Math & Algorithms 1History & Retro Computing 1
2
[ -z $var ] works unreasonably well
There is a subreddit /r/nononoyes for videos of things that look like they’ll go horribly wrong, but amazingly turn out ok.