Bash Scripting General Questions (conditionals and variable passing)

Question

I'm rather new to bash scripting, and Google isn't as useful as I'd like for this. I'm just playing around with a little password entry program in my .bash_profile and have something like this:

read PASSWORD
if $PASSWORD != 'pass'; then
    echo "wrong. exiting"
    exit
fi

Unfortunately, this doesn't work. I get these errors (darwin on 10.6)...

EDIT Sorry about this posting. My browser crashed and I didn't even realize this posted. I ended up figuring it out on my own – again sorry. But thanks for the answers!

Answer 1

You are missing square brackets. The if line should be:

if [ $PASSWORD != 'pass' ]; then

or even better:

if [ "$PASSWORD" != 'pass' ]; then

Which will avoid failure if $PASSWORD is empty.