What does "-ne" mean in bash?

What does the command "-ne" mean in a bash script?

For instance, what does the following line from a bash script do?

[ $RESULT -ne 0 ] 

This is one of those things that can be difficult to search for if you don't already know where to look.

[ is actually a command, not part of the bash shell syntax as you might expect. It happens to be a Bash built-in command, so it's documented in the Bash manual.

There's also an external command that does the same thing; on many systems, it's provided by the GNU Coreutils package.

[ is equivalent to the test command, except that [ requires ] as its last argument, and test does not.

Assuming the bash documentation is installed on your system, if you type info bash and search for 'test' or '[' (the apostrophes are part of the search), you'll find the documentation for the [ command, also known as the test command. If you use man bash instead of info bash, search for ^ *test (the word test at the beginning of a line, following some number of spaces).

Following the reference to "Bash Conditional Expressions" will lead you to the description of -ne, which is the numeric inequality operator ("ne" stands for "not equal). By contrast, != is the string inequality operator.

You can also find bash documentation on the web.

• Bash reference
• Bourne shell builtins (including test and [)
• Bash Conditional Expressions -- (Scroll to the bottom; -ne is under "arg1 OP arg2")
• POSIX documentation for test

The official definition of the test command is the POSIX standard (to which the bash implementation should conform reasonably well, perhaps with some extensions).

"not equal" So in this case, $RESULT is tested to not be equal to zero.

However, the test is done numerically, not alphabetically:

n1 -ne n2     True if the integers n1 and n2 are not algebraically equal.

compared to:

s1 != s2      True if the strings s1 and s2 are not identical.