Julian Gilbey <j...@debian.org> writes: > Upgrading to bash 5.2.0(1)-rc2 did not help, neither did using \( > instead of (, and neither did putting spaces around the parentheses.
It's ugly. The first point is that ( and ) are special characters and if unquoted are isolated tokens that have special syntax. So in order to get [ to see them as arguments, you have to quote ( and ). But the quoted characters are ordinary characters and to make them be separate arguments to [, you have to separate them from the adjacent arguments with spaces. So this version works: if [ \( "$1" = "yes" -o "$1" = "YES" \) -a \( "$2" = "red" -o "$2" = "RED" \) ] then echo "Yes, it's red" else echo "No, it's not red" fi Dale