[For reference, I’m talking about Ash in Alpine Linux here, which is part of BusyBox.]

I thought I knew the big differences, but it turns out I’ve had false assumptions for years. Ash does support [[ double square brackets ]] and (as best I can tell) all of Bash’s logical trickery inside them. It also supports ${VARIABLE_SUBSTRINGS:5:12}` which was another surprise.

At this stage, the only things I’ve found that Bash can do that Ash can’t are:

  • Arrays, which Bash doesn’t seem to do well anyway
  • Brace expansion, which is awesome but I can live without it.

What else is there? Did Ash used to be more limited? The double square bracket thing really surprised me.

  • jntesteves@lemmy.world
    5·
    1 year ago

    Although that link exists, that’s not what is being used by default. [[ is a shell builtin in ash/busybox, so that takes precedence.

    On Alpine:

    ❯ which [[
/usr/bin/[[

❯ command -V [[
[[ is a shell builtin
    • Daniel QuinnOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Huh. So the link is unnecessary and Ash supports [[ out of the box? Good to know, thanks!