How to escape hyphen(-) in shell script?

Question

My bash script keeps failing because it gets confused at the hyphen:

if [ ! -d "$openssl-1.0.1i"]; then ...

How do I escape it correctly?

Are you sure it's in the hyphen? You've forgot a space before `]`. — pacholik, Sep 30 '15 at 07:46

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 30 '15 at 07:47

It's not the hyphen, you must leave a space surrounding each argument in your test construct:

if [ ! -d "$openssl-1.0.1i" ]; then ..

Why do you have a $ before openssl? It's not a variable is it? If not, it should be just:

if [ ! -d "openssl-1.0.1i" ]; then ..

1 Answers1