Everything is a file – including punctuation

Unix, stop messing with my head.

davemc@slarti:~$ which [
/usr/bin/[


Stop it. Seriously.

Okay, so [ is a command. A program. An executable. Not some syntactic massage oil applied by the shell's if and while and such (although the man page hints that in some shells it may well be).

And it has most of the same behaviour as test... that, at least, makes sense. Except that [ expects a ] as its final argument, while test doesn’t.

Huh. Cool.