Re: [Help-bash] Conditional expression evaluation using [ and [[ with -eq operator

[Greg Wooledge]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 05:41:47PM +0000, Peggy Russell wrote:
> declare var='a'
> 
> if [ "$var" -eq "$var" ]; then

My personal recommendation would be: don't use -eq, ever.  It blows
up if the arguments aren't integers.  If they are integers, it acts
just like =.  So, there's really no reason not to use = in the first
place.

I consider it one of the things that POSIX and backward compatibilty
require Bash to implement, but which should be considered deprecated
for purposes of writing new scripts.