Arguably, I never fully learned Bash syntax, but it also is just a stupid if-statement. There shouldn’t be that much complexity in it.
There isn't. The syntax is
if COMMANDthenCOMMAND(s)...elseCOMMAND(s)...fi
I believe, if you write the then onto the next line, then you don’t need the semicolon.
Yes, but that's true of all commands.
foo; bar; baz
is the same as
foobarbaz
All the ] and -z stuff has nothing to do with if. In your example, the command you're running is literally called [. You're passing it three arguments: -z, "$var", and ]. The ] argument is technically pointless but included for aesthetic reasons to match the opening ] (if you wanted to, you could also write test -z "$var" because [ is just another name for the test command).
Since you can logically negate the exit status of every command (technically, every pipeline) by prefixing a !, you could also write this as:
if ! test "$var"; then ...
The default mode of test (if given one argument) is to check whether it is non-empty.
Now, if you don't want to deal with the vagaries of the test command and do a "native" string check, that would be:
case "$var" in "") echo "empty";; *) echo "not empty";;esac
@affiliate Hey, you didn't even mention that char *args[] actually means char **args in a parameter list.
Strictly speaking, it should be
Unsafe block syntax in C++
{ ...}
... Perl, Haskell, Lisp, ...
Not to be rude but not having a linter configured and running is a pretty basic issue.
Yeah, if you're a C programmer in the 1980s, maybe. But it's 2006 now and compilers are able to do basic sanity checks all on their own.
I haven’t used Perl though, what do you like better about it?
"Undeclared variable" is a compile-time error.
Incidentally, this is an anti-pattern: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls#cmd1_.26.26_cmd2_.7C.7C_cmd3